The A to Z of Fantasy Literature

by Stableford, Brian M.

  McCAUGHREAN, GERALDINE (1951– ). British writer. She produced straightforwardly recycled versions of One Thousand and One Arabian Nights (1982), Greek Myths (1993), Roman Myths (2001), and Myths

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  and Legends of the World (4 vols. 1996–99) for children. The mosaic A Pack of Lies (1988) features the exotic pitches of a supernatural sales-person. The Maypole (1990) and Fires’ Astonishment (1990) extrapolate the substance of two ballads. The Stones Are Hatching (1999) features dangerous progeny of a “Worm.” It’s Not the End of the World (2004) is a biblical fantasy about the Deluge. See also DRAGON.

  McKENNA, JULIET E. (1965– ). British writer. The series comprising The Thief ’s Gamble (1999), The Swordsman’s Oath (1999), The Gambler’s Fortune (2000), The Warrior’s Bond (2001), and The Assassin’s Edge (2002) is a picaresque fantasy with much swashbuckling. The Aldabreshin Compass series, begun with Southern Fire (2003) and Northern Storm (2004), features a society steadfastly opposed to magic.

  Turns and Chances (2004) is a novella set in the same milieu.

  McKIERNAN, DENNIS L. (1932– ). U.S. writer. The three-decker novel comprising The Dark Tide (1984), Shadows of Doom (1984), and The Darkest Day (1984), set in Mithgar, pays homage to J. R. R. Tolkien, similarly redeploying elements of Nordic mythology; Trek to Kraggen-Cor (1986) and The Brega Path (1986) constitute a sequel. Dragondoom (1990) and The Eye of the Hunter (1992) concentrate on sociopolitical aspects of the scenario; Voyage of the Fox Rider (1993) and The Drag-onstone (1996) broaden the argument toward a general discussion of theodicy. Early short fiction from the series is assembled in Tales of Mithgar (1994); it is continued in the Hell’s Crucible couplet Into the Forge (1997) and Into the Fire (1998), then in the novel Silver Wolf, Black Falcon (2000) and the stories collected in Red Slippers (2004).

  The unrelated metaphysical fantasy Caverns of Socrates (1995) employs a computer game as a launchpad. Once upon a Winter’s Night (2001) transfigures the fairy tale “East of the Sun, West of the Moon.”

  McKILLIP, PATRICIA A. (1948– ). U.S. writer. Her first published works were the children’s fantasies The House on Parchment Street (1973), a ghost story, and The Throme of the Erril of Sherill (1973; reissued 1982 with “The Harrowing of the Dragon of Hairsbreath”), a humorous fantasy in the tradition of James Thurber. The Forgotten Beasts of Eld (1974 but written earlier), a moralistic fantasy about the sentimental education of an enchantress, made a significant crossover into the adult market as genre fantasy began to take off.

  The trilogy comprising The Riddle Master of Hed (1976), Heir of Sea and Fire (1977), and Harpist in the Wind (1979) is a more orthodox

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  feminized/heroic fantasy. Stepping from the Shadows (1982) is a naturalistic novel about the making of a fantasy writer; McKillip then digressed into sf (refer to HDSFL) before returning to wholehearted fantasy with a sequence of distinctive and exceptionally stylish works that placed her at the cutting edge of the burgeoning commercial

  genre and a figure of central importance within it. The Changeling Sea (1988) is aimed at younger readers, but The Sorceress and the Cygnet (1991) brought a meditative sophistication and a seasoning of comedy to an unusual quest fantasy; the adventures and philosophical inquiries continued in The Cygnet and the Firebird (1993). Something Rich and Strange (1994), issued in a series based on illustrations by Brian Froud, is an exquisitely detailed romance in which a female artist and her halfhearted lover are separately seduced by sea sprites.

  In The Book of Atrix Wolfe (1995), a fugitive magician hides among wolves while searching for the lost daughter of the Queen of the Wood.

  Winter Rose (1996) juxtaposes Victorian England and a parallel world of Faerie. Song for the Basilisk (1998), which features a royal child who finds a new destiny after surviving a massacre, brought a new sophistication to bardic fantasy. The Tower at Stony Wood (2000) is an equally sophisticated neo-chivalric romance. Ombria in Shadow (2002) is a fairy tale romance of fabulous city and its dark counterpart. In the Forests of Serre (2003) is a dark and complex story including transfigurations of Russian folklore. Alphabet of Thorn (2004) continues the development of themes broached in its immediate predecessors; one of its heroines—a translator working in a library who revitalizes an item of ancient folklore and weaves its contents into the texture of the present—

  might be regarded as a reflection of the author at work.

  McKINLEY, ROBIN (1952– ). U.S. writer resident in Britain since 1992.

  Beauty (1978) is an unusually enterprising recycling of a classic fairy tale. Others are included, alongside pastiches, in The Door in the Hedge (1981), while Deerskin (1993) restores adult material censored from Charles Perrault’s “Donkeyskin”; Rose Daughter (1997) and Spindle’s End (2000) revisit the theme of Beauty on behalf of younger readers.

  The series comprising The Blue Sword (1982), its prequel The Hero and the Crown (1985), and several items in A Knot in the Grain and Other Stories (1994) is a heroic fantasy set in the imaginary kingdom of Damar. In The Stone Fey (1998), a young woman develops a relationship with an elusive mountain creature. Sunshine (2003) is a striking fu-

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  turistic fantasy in which all supernatural species except vampires are accepted following the Voodoo Wars. McKinley and her husband, Peter Dickinson, each contributed three stories to Water: Tales of Elemental Spirits (2002, aka Elementals: Water). She edited a notable showcase anthology, Imaginary Lands (1985).

  MELODRAMATIC INFLATION. The necessity of continually increasing the magnitude of the threats that a hero is required to overcome in a sequential plot or a series of books. Because fantasies featuring protagonists and antagonists equipped with magical or superhuman powers

  have no intrinsic limits, melodramatic inflation routinely places entire worlds—or even multiverses—in jeopardy. The black magicians with whom the protagonists of heroic fantasy are faced in the early phases of their careers tend to be replaced in short order by demons, and then by dark gods, whose summary dispatch often comes to seem ludicrously artificial, frequently forcing the retirement of series heroes because no greater challenges remain for them to overcome. Immersive fantasy trilogies often build to an apocalyptic “final battle” at the end of the third volume, in which the settlement of moral order is so extreme that authors of sequel trilogies are driven to great lengths to invent new and nastier antagonists; many writers, understandably, settle for writing prequels, which may then serve as starting points for fill-in exercises.

  MERFOLK. Chimerical sea creatures human above the waist and fish be-low. They tend to be confused with sirens, routinely featuring in modern fantasy as seductive singers. The key exemplar provided by Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid” echoes in many other texts, most notably Oscar Wilde’s carefully reconfigured “The Fisherman and his Soul”; H. G. Wells’s The Sea Lady and Norman Douglas’s Nerinda are sceptical reactions. Many mid-20th-century modern fantasies featuring mermaids employed their erotic potential to humorous ends—including Norman Walker’s Loona, A Strange Tail (1931); Peabody’s Mermaid (1946), by Guy and Constance Jones; and Robert Bloch’s “Mr Margate’s Mermaid”—but Theodore Sturgeon’s “A Touch of Strange” (1958) and Ray Bradbury’s “The Shoreline at Sunset” (1959) carefully conserved their sentimental aspect.

  Poul Anderson’s The Merman’s Children restored the gravity of the folkloristic tradition in a striking account of the inexorable thinning of Faerie; Alida Van Gores’ Mermaid’s Song (1989) is similarly inclined.

  Other notable mermaid stories include Julia Blackburn’s The Leper’s

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  Companions (1999), Alan Temperley’s Huntress of the Sea (1999), Alice Hoffman’s Aquamarine, Donna Jo Napoli’s Sirena, and Carol Ann Sima’s The Mermaid That Came between Them (2002). Variants are usually modest, like the “mermyds” of Kara Dalkey’s Water series; Tod Robbins’s “The Whimpus” is more adventurous. Fake
mermaids—

  sometimes known as “Jenny Hanivers”—have long been a stock in trade of taxidermists and curio sellers; Jane Yolen’s “The Malaysian Mer”

  (1982) features an unusually lively example. Mermaids! (1985), ed.

  Gardner Dozois and Jack Dann, is a showcase anthology.

  MERLIN. The legendary king’s magical advisor becomes the central figure in much Arthurian fantasy that puts the emphasis on magic rather than chivalric heroism, and he is particularly prominent in Celtic variants. He is the prototype of the wizards of modern fantasy, his brand of magic sometimes being opposed to that of Morgan le Fay. As with Arthur, legend suggests that Merlin never died—instead, being imprisoned in a tree—thus being ever ready to return when the time is ripe, as he does in works by C. S. Lewis, Susan Cooper, Peter Dickinson, Jane Louise Curry, Robert Newman’s Merlin’s Mistake (1970), and Colin Webber’s humorous Merlin and the Last Trump (1993).

  Notable transfigurations of Merlin’s life story are wrought by Mary Stewart, Jane Yolen, and T. A. Barron, and in Robert Nye’s Merlin (1978) and J. Robert King’s Mad Merlin (2000). Other notable literary portraits of Merlin can be found in John Cowper Powys’s Porius, Alvaro Cunqueiro’s Merlin and Company (1955 in Spanish; tr. 1996), and Ann Lawrence’s Merlin the Wizard.

  MERRITT, A. (1884–1943). U.S. writer whose lush pulp fantasies took escapism to exotic extremes unexplored by Edgar Rice Burroughs but never found a satisfactory terminus. “Through the Dragon Glass” (1917) and “The People of the Pit” (1918) were practice runs for the classic portal fantasy “The Moon Pool” (1918), which features a carefully guarded magical doorway through which—it is implied—all the treasures of the human imagination lie. Unable to live up to that prospectus, the sequel (combined with the original in the book version) seemed distinctly lame; the further sequel The Metal Monster (1920; rev. 1927 as

  “The Metal Emperor”; book 1946) probably took a wrong turn in mov-

  ing toward sf (refer to HDSFL). The novella “The Face in the Abyss”

  (1923) was more appropriately supplemented by “The Snake Mother”

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  (1930), but the combination of the two as The Face in the Abyss (1931) reduced the impact of the former item considerably.

  The hallucinatory fantasy The Ship of Ishtar (1924; book 1926) foreshadowed sword and sorcery fiction in co-opting its protagonist to play the hero in an eternal struggle between Ishtar and Nergal. Its pessimistic conclusion is echoed in the sentimental fantasy “The Woman of the Wood” (1926). Merritt used a lost race framework in Dwellers in the Mirage (1932), which modeled its protagonist’s Haggard-esque emotional conflicts too honestly for its initial editor, who substituted a false happy ending (Merritt’s conclusion was revealed in a 1941

  reprint). Burn, Witch, Burn! (1933) is a thriller featuring murderous dolls animated by a witch; its sequel Creep, Shadow! (1934) invokes an ancient curse relating to the destruction of the drowned land of Ys.

  Merritt left a number of fragmentary works, two of which— The Fox Woman and the Blue Pagoda (1946) and The Black Wheel (1947)—were fleshed out by his disciple Hannes Bok. The former was reprinted in The Fox Woman and Other Stories (1949); a few others appear, along with poetry and a biography of the author, in A. Merritt: Reflections in the Moon Pool (1985), ed. by Sam Moskowitz.

  MESMERISM. A therapeutic system—the forerunner of modern hypnotism—invented by Franz Mesmer (1734–1815). It allegedly involved

  the transmission between individuals of a kind of life force called “animal magnetism.” It was adopted as a staple device by such contemporary writers as E. T. A. Hoffmann and was subsequently recruited to add plausibility to visionary fantasies by Edgar Allan Poe and Marie Corelli; it was also routinely employed in tales of identity exchange and psychic vampirism, and used to invoke memories of reincarnation in such works as Mrs. Campbell Praed’s Nyria and the later adventures of Rider Haggard’s Allan Quatermain. The literary image of the mesmerist was redefined by the exemplar of Svengali in George du Maurier’s Trilby, whose peers are featured in numerous occult fantasies, but late 20th-century versions became more modest and more benign under the influence of hypnotism’s popularity as a therapeutic technique and the increasing fashionability of “past-life regression.”

  MESSIANIC FANTASY. In the Old Testament, the messiah is the prophesied deliverer of the Jews from historical misfortune; Christianity is founded on the proposition that Jesus was he and will return to supervise the apocalypse before instituting his reparative 1,000-year reign.

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  The term is applied by analogy to any deliverer whose advent or return is widely anticipated and quasi-apocalyptic in its significance. Folklore often attaches a messianic glamor to legendary heroes like King Arthur and Frederick Barbarossa, and heroic fantasy often features their like; one of the subgenre’s favorite themes is the displacement into a secondary world of a discontented inhabitant of the primary world in order to play a messianic role, as in Stephen R. Donaldson’s Thomas Covenant series.

  Disguised Christian fantasies often use symbolic substitutes, like C.

  S. Lewis’s Aslan and G. P. Taylor’s Raphah. A significant variant features messianic protagonists whose reemergence is ironically unwelcome—examples include Edgar Jepson’s The Horned Shepherd, Damon Knight’s The Man in the Tree (1983), Theodore Sturgeon’s Godbody (1986), and James Morrow’s Only Begotten Daughter—although such accounts are quite distinct from accounts of evil messiahs, known in Christian parlance as “antichrists.” Another variant features quests to find and protect children unlucky enough to be heirs to messianic destinies, as in Rebecca Neason’s The Thirteenth Scroll (2001) and The Truest Power (2002). Other notable messianic fantasies include Elizabeth Goudge’s The Little White Horse, Fay Sampson’s Them, Jane Yolen’s Sister Light, Sister Dark, and David Zindell’s Ea cycle.

  METAFICTION. A term that became fashionable in the 1980s as a description of one of the central strands of postmodern fiction, consisting of fabulations whose core subject matter is the process of literary creativity; in Fabulation and Metafiction (1979), Robert Scholes defines it succinctly as “experimental fabulation.” Metafiction’s exceedingly acute consciousness of its own fictionality often involves the redeployment of material from other texts in order to lay bare or explore their hidden subtexts, so it routinely involves complex exercises in recycling and transfiguration; its history extends back at least as far as Paul Fé-

  val’s Knightshade.

  The Clute/Grant Encyclopedia uses the term recursive fantasy to refer to fantasies in which protagonists enter secondary worlds based on previously existing fictions—Walter de la Mare’s Henry Brocken, John Myers Myers’s Silverlock, and Stephen King’s Dark Tower series are conspicuous examples—adding a second meaning in which a

  similar effect is obtained by reference to fictions that have no existence outside the text that refers to them, such as Michael Ende’s The Neverending Story and Jonathan Carroll’s The Land of Laughs. Another

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  notable subset of metafictions features writers whose creations get out of control in various ways, as in Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds, Michael Joyce’s Peregrine Pieram (1936), and Cornelia Funke’s Inkheart.

  Conscious postmodern sophistication has resulted in a dramatic in-

  crease in the number and variety of metafictions; habitual practitioners include Steven Millhauser, Jostein Gaarder, and Jasper Fforde.

  Playful examples of extraordinary literary convolution include Michael Bishop’s Who Made Stevie Crye? , Umberto Eco’s The Island of the Day Before, Rebecca Lickiss’s Eccentric Circles (2001), and Roderick Townley’s The Great Good Thing (2001). Jeremy Dronfield’s The Alchemist’s Apprentice (2001) features a book whose nonexistence is partly a result of its having enchanted millions. In Marius Brill’s Making Love: A Conspiracy of the Heart (2003), a book falls in love with its reader. Thomas W
harton’s Salamander (2001) is about the attempted creation of an infinite book.

  METAPHYSICAL FANTASY. Fiction attempting to define or devise a realm of existence that lies outside the scope of sensory perception, usually in order to assist speculative explanations to reach beyond what is observable and measurable. All myth-based and religious fantasies have a metaphysical component, because the provision of such metaphysical explanations is one of the primary functions of myth and religion, but the term is reserved here to those fantasies that attempt originality in defining new metaphysical systems.

  Some occult fantasy, including most alchemical fantasy, is metaphysical in its implications, and texts that attempt to define the relationship between the primary world and Faerie often have recourse to metaphysical speculation, as do other hybrid texts attempting to reconcile the products of rival worldviews. Writers whose work is primarily dedicated to metaphysical speculation include Algernon Blackwood, David Lindsay, Mircea Eliade, and Ronald Fraser; other notable examples include Fiona MacLeod’s Green Fire, G. Ware Cornish’s Beneath the Surface (1918), Charles Williams’s The Place of the Lion, Herbert Read’s The Green Child (1935), E. H. Visiak’s The Shadow (1936), Jules Romains’s Tussles with Time (1951; tr. from French 1952), and Daniel Quinn’s The Holy (2002). Designers of secondary worlds in genre fantasy rarely pay much attention to their metaphysical frames, the chief exceptions being Guy Gavriel Kay and writers giving serious consideration to the notion of the multiverse.

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  MEYRINK, GUSTAVE (1868–1932). Austrian writer. His early short fiction is sampled in translation in The Opal and Other Stories (1903–1907; tr. 1994), but later collections, including Goldmachergeschichten [“Stories about Alchemists”] (1925), remain untranslated. His first novel, The Golem (1915; abridged tr. 1928; restored text tr. 1977), is a dark/hallucinatory fantasy. The Green Face (1916; tr. 1992) and Walpurgisnacht (1917; tr. 1993) move portentously toward potentially redemptive apocalypses with fantastic harbingers that are deeply enigmatic. The occult fantasy The White Dominican (1921; tr. 1994) concentrates more intently on the individual fate of its protagonist, as does the complex alchemical fantasy The Angel of the West Window (1927; tr. 1991).