The A to Z of Fantasy Literature

by Stableford, Brian M.

  MICHELET, JULES (1798–1874). French historian, of whom it was said that no other ever cared less for accuracy. Always in need of money to support himself while he compiled his ambitious narrative history of France, he was inspired by the success of Éliphas Lévi to dash off the popular potboiler La Sorcière [“The Female Witch”] (1862; tr. as The Witch of the Middle Ages and Satanism and Witchcraft). Its second part is a series of journalistic accounts of famous sorcery trials, but its long lyrical prologue is a deliberate scholarly fantasy approvingly representing the witches of France as a feminized underground movement of social protest against the tyranny of church and state. Supplemented by the works of Charles Godfrey Leland and Margaret Murray, it became a key element in the ideological apparatus of modern paganism, witchcraft, and goddess worship; it is a vital, if largely unacknowledged, taproot text of genre fantasy.

  MIDDLETON, HAYDN (1955– ). British writer. The couplet comprising The People in the Picture (1987) and The Collapsing Castle (1990) are contemporary fantasies whose supernatural elements are based in Celtic fantasy. Son of Two Worlds (1987) straightforwardly recycles a tale from the Mabinogion. The trilogy comprising The King’s Evil (1995), The Queen’s Captives (1996), and The Knight’s Vengeance (1997) is an Arthurian fantasy foregrounding Mordred. Grimm’s Last Fairytale (1999) is an account of the last days of the famous folklorist.

  MIÉVILLE, CHINA (1972– ). British writer. King Rat (1998) is a graphic contemporary fantasy based on the story of the Pied Piper.

  Perdido Street Station (2000) is a complex immersive fantasy in which hybridization of disparate materials coalesces into a graphic image of the decadent city of New Crobuzon. The Scar (2002) is an Odyssean

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  fantasy set in the same secondary world of Bas Lag. Iron Council (2004) returns to New Crobuzon for an account of rebellion and a legendary nation on wheels. The Tain (2002) is a novella in which London is threatened by invasion from the world within mirrors. Miéville placed his work within the context of a vague movement, careless of traditional generic boundaries, which he dubbed “The New Weird” in Locus 515 (2003), naming Steve Cockayne and Steph Swanston—author of The Year of Our War (2004)—as other key examples.

  MILES, ROSALIND (1943– ). British writer. Her fantasies are feminized Arthuriana boldly exhibiting a “New Age” sensibility. The Guen-evere series comprises Queen of the Summer Country (1999), The Knight of the Sacred Lake (2000), and Child of the Holy Grail (2000).

  The Isolde series comprises Isolde: Queen of the Western Isle (2002), The Maid of White Hands (2003), and The Lady of the Sea (2004).

  MILITARY FANTASY. Armies are common features of heroic fantasy, but their military organization is subject to careful consideration in only a small minority of stories. Matters of training and tactics first came into focus in timeslip stories in the wake of Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, but the emergence of a manifest subgenre of military fantasy was not clearly evident until the advent of an obvious subgenre of military sf (refer to HDSFL), many of whose practitioners took a keen interest in the history of military organization, especially in the Roman Empire. The reflection of such interests can be seen in the fantasies of David Drake, Glen Cook, David Gemmell, Dave Duncan, and James Barclay, and in such military sf spinoff as Elizabeth Moon’s Deed of Paksenarion series, begun with Sheepfarmer’s Daughter (1988). The influence of military sf was combined with the influence of fantasy war-gaming, which generated work by such writers as

  Michael A. Stackpole as well as tie-in projects.

  The technofetishism of military sf has its equivalent in fantasy in a fascination for medieval arms and armor, especially swords. Striking examples include K. J. Parker’s Fencer trilogy, comprising Colours in the Steel (1998), The Belly of the Bow (1999), and The Proof House (2000), and Richard Brown’s Golden Armour series, comprising The Helmet (2000), The Shield (2000), and The Spurs (2000). The corrupting armor in John Marco’s The Devil’s Armor (2003) adds an ironic twist reminiscent of such avid magical weapons as Michael Moorcock’s Stormbringer. See also GAMES.

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  MILLAR, MARTIN (?– ). Scottish writer, His work under his own byline includes The Good Fairies of New York (1992), in which punk fairies are air-freighted to New York after getting drunk; Lux and Alby Sign On and Save the Universe (1999), in which the fairies in question join up with characters from earlier novels, with apocalyptic consequences; and Suzy, Led Zeppelin and Me (2002), in which Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Hank Williams take a zeppelin trip from heaven to see a 1972 Led Zeppelin concert. The hybrid Thraxas series, bylined “Martin Scott”—comprising Thraxas (1999), Thraxas and the Warrior Monks (1999), Thraxas at the Races (1999), Thraxas and the Elvish Isles (2000), Thraxas and the Sorcerers (2001), Thraxas and the Dance of Death (2002), Thraxas at War (2003), and Thraxas under Siege (2003)—is also humorous, featuring the exploits of a private investigator in a magical city.

  MILLHAUSER, STEVEN (1943– ). U.S. writer who dabbles extensively in metafiction. From the Realms of Morpheus (1986) is a complex underworld fantasy with concerns that overlap with those of the short fiction in In the Penny Arcade (1986). The Barnum Museum (1990) allows access to various fantasy worlds, including that of the board game Cluedo, “The Eighth Voyage of Sinbad,” and (Lewis Carroll’s) “Alice, Falling.” Two of the novellas in Little Kingdoms (1993) describe intimate relationships between artists and the worlds contained in their works, while the third, “The Princess, the Dwarf and the Dungeon,” is an art fairy tale. Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer (1997) is a fabulatory bildungsroman in which a focus on the American Dream is retained by the phantasmagoric Enchanted Night (2000) and some of the stories in The Knife Thrower and Other Stories (1999).

  The three novellas in The King in the Tree (2004) include transfigurations of the stories of Tristan and Don Juan.

  MILNE, A. A. (1882–1956). British writer associated with Punch, whose idiosyncratic vein of humor fed the fairy tale extravaganza Once on a Time (1917) and echoes in the classic fantasy world Milne built around toy animals owned by his son Christopher Robin Milne, elaborated in Winnie-the-Pooh (1926) and The House at Pooh Corner (1928). Subsequent works inspired by this endeavor include a fine collection of parodic essays in literary criticism by Frederick Crews, The Pooh Perplex (1963). More children’s fantasies are collected in Prince Rabbit and the Princess Who Could Not Laugh (1926). Milne’s plays include the alle-

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  gorical fairy tale The Ivory Door (1928) and a dramatization of Kenneth Grahame’s Wind in the Willows, Toad of Toad Hall (1929).

  MILTON, JOHN (1608–1674). British poet of vast influence, particularly by virtue of his authorship of the epic Paradise Lost (1667; rev. 1674); its version of Lucifer’s rebellion, the subsequent war in heaven, and the Devil’s temptation of Adam and Eve became definitive, eclipsing the verse drama to which it was a counterblast—Justus van den Vondel’s anti-Puritan Lucifer (1654)—in the eyes of many subsequent writers who used it as a taproot text. Its influence has not always reflected Milton’s intentions, given that he is credited with the inspiration of the tradition of literary satanism and is extensively quoted in such examples thereof as Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials.

  Milton’s other works of fantasy relevance include a masque that came to be known as Comus (1634), after the character of an imaginary classical deity—the offspring of Bacchus and Circe—who seduces travelers into drinking a theriomorphic liquor; the Christian fantasy poem Paradise Regained (1671); and a biblical fantasy play modeled on the Greek tragedy Samson Agonistes (1671). (These works also echo Vondel’s endeavors in such satires as “The Passing of Orpheus” and “Rivalry of Apollo and Pan,” and the biblical fantasies “Adam in Exile” and

  “Noah.”)

  MINIATURIZATION. Stories in which humans are reduced in size, thus being enabled to see the world, especially its insect life, from a differ
ent viewpoint. Many didactic tales of this kind present themselves as sf (refer to HDSFL) despite obvious logical difficulties, but their deployment in fantasy is complicated by various myths of preexistent “little people.”

  The notion that fairies are miniature human beings, with or without in-sectile wings, takes some warrant from the supposition that elves were a species of dwarfs, but it only became commonplace through the

  agency of Victorian fairy art, which routinely made fairies comparable in size to insects—a notion that exerted an enormous influence on the development of children’s fantasy. Such representations dovetail neatly with didactic stories in which human protagonists are miniaturized; Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies is a notable hybrid, and the notion of Faerie as a miniature world within our own is elaborately sophisticated in John Crowley’s Little, Big.

  The Lilliputians described in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) were extensively copied and are recycled in such works as T. H.

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  White’s Mistress Masham’s Repose and Willis Hall’s The Return of the Antelope (1985). Many other kinds of little people continue to thrive in fantasy, including Mary Norton’s The Borrowers and Terry Pratchett’s Truckers. Miniaturization sometimes enables protagonists to enter the world of their playthings, as in F. Anstey’s Only Toys, and there is an interesting subset of fantasy stories featuring dollhouses, which includes Jane Louise Curry’s Mindy’s Mysterious Miniature, Monica Hughes’s Castle Tourmandyne, several works by Kathryn Reiss, and Nancy Willard’s Uncle Terrible.

  MIRRLEES, HOPE (1887–1978). British writer. Her early immersive fantasy Lud-in-the-Mist (1926), which makes much of the notion of

  “forbidden fruit,” as deployed in Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market, was a late but highly significant addition to post–World War I pleas for re-enchantment. It was reprinted by Lin Carter in the Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series, subsequently exerting considerable influence on James P. Blaylock and Neil Gaiman.

  MIRRORS. Reflection has long seemed a quasi-magical property, and mirrors routinely feature as magical devices in fairy tales, the most famous being the one featured in the oft-recycled tale of Snow White and that featured in the opening sequence of Hans Christian Andersen’s

  “The Snow Queen.” Literary mirrors often reveal more than they

  should, accommodating phantom intruders in such tales as one interpolated in George MacDonald’s Phantastes. They may also serve as portals, as in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, or as generators of doppelgängers, as in William Garrett’s The Man in the Mirror (1931) and Peter Dickinson’s The Lion-Tamer’s Daughter.

  Notable 20th-century fantasies in which mirrors play a crucial role include Avram Davidson’s The Phoenix and the Mirror (1966), Louise Cooper’s Mirror Mirror trilogy, Ian Irvine’s A Shadow on the Glass, and China Miéville’s The Tain. Mirrors (2001), ed. Wendy Cooling, is a showcase anthology.

  MITCHISON, NAOMI (1897–1999). Scottish writer in various genres, primarily noted for novels set in the distant past, which often foreground magical beliefs and practices derived from Frazerian/scholarly fantasy, as in The Corn King and the Spring Queen (1931), the 18th-century-set The Bull Calves (1947)—with a protagonist who becomes a witch—and Early in Orcadia (1987). Fantasy elements are more conspicuous in Beyond the Limit (1935), a hallucinatory fantasy

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  intimately linked to Wyndham Lewis’s illustrations; the timeslip fantasy The Big House (1950); Travel Light (1952), based in Nordic mythology; and To the Chapel Perilous (1955), a satirical/chivalric romance.

  MODESITT, L. E., JR. (1943– ). U.S. writer also known for sf (refer to HDSFL). The series comprising The Magic of Recluce (1991), The Towers of the Sunset (1992), The Magic Engineer (1994), The Order War (1995), The Death of Chaos (1995), The Fall of Angels (1996), The Chaos Balance (1997), The White Order (1998), Colors of Chaos (1999), Magi’i of Cyador (2000), Scion of Cyador (2000), and Wellspring of Chaos (2004) features rival followers of Order and Chaos attempting to find new ways of exploiting the elaborate rules governing their magic, against the background of an evolving technology. Of Tan-gible Ghosts (1994) is set in an alternative history in which the living and dead maintain routine communications. In the Spellsong Cycle series, comprising The Soprano Sorceress (1997), The Spellsong War (1998), Darksong Rising (1999), The Shadow Sorceress (2001), and Shadowsinger (2002), a portal gives access to a world where music is magical. The secondary world featured in Corean Chronicles, comprising Legacies (2002), Darknesses (2003), and Scepters (2004), has Arcadian elements.

  MOLLOY, MICHAEL (1940– ). British journalist who became editor of the Daily Mirror in 1974 and editor in chief of the Mirror Group in 1984. His children’s fiction includes a lighthearted fantasy adventure trilogy comprising The Witch Trade (2001), The Time Witches (2001), and The Wild West Witches (2004), in which castaways are drawn into a quest in a secondary world. The House on Falling Star Hill (2004) is a portal fantasy.

  MONACO, RICHARD (1940– ). U.S. scholar and writer. The sequence comprising Parsival; or, A Knight’s Tale (1977), The Grail War (1979), The Final Quest (1980) and Blood and Dreams (1985) offers a sceptical account of the grail quest. Runes (1984) and Broken Stone (1985) are historical fantasies in which Romans contest with druids. Journey to the Flame (1985) is a metafictional recycling of Rider Haggard’s She.

  MONSTERS. Creatures, including humans, whose nature or appearance induces a combination of fear and revulsion, sometimes confused with pity. Whereas horror fiction, virtually by definition, uses monsters as

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  generators of terror (refer to HDHL), fantasy routinely challenges, undermines, or defuses their horrific aspects, as is very evident in fantasy deployments of dragons, vampires, giants, and werewolves, and in Raymond Briggs’s parodic assault on the archetypal monster of parental terrorism in Fungus the Bogeyman. Even the standardized adversaries of commodified fantasy rarely lack apologists for long; trolls are stoutly defended by John Vornholt and orcs by Stan Nicholls.

  Monsters continue to be used as antagonists in celebratory heroic fantasy, in which capacity they are required to seem terrible, but daylit combat offers a perspective quite different from that of night-obscured stalking, sometimes allowing them to borrow a little of their opponents’

  glamor. Joseph Campbell’s contention that the monsters a hero meets on his road of trials are symbolic projections of his unconscious fears and desires is reflected in such accounts of dragon slaying as William Mayne’s The Worm in the Well, such freak-show fantasies as Charles G. Finney’s The Circus of Dr. Lao, and such psychological melodramas as E. H. Visiak’s sea-monster story Medusa (1929).

  Mythical monsters have long been catalogued in exotic bestiaries; a useful modern sampler is Joseph Nigg’s anthology The Book of Fabulous Beasts (1999).

  THE MOON. The fundamental dualism of light and darkness, which symbolize good and evil in so many fantasies, is confused by the cycli-cal role of the moon in ameliorating the darkness of certain nights.

  Quasi-dualistic oppositions between deities associated with the sun, who are usually male, and deities associated with the moon, who are frequently female, tend to be complex in both myth and literature, also reflecting the moon’s relationship with tides. The firm association between the moon and various female deities of classical mythology ensures that images of the goddess in modern literary fantasy are almost invariably imbued with lunar imagery, as in significant works by Greer Gilman and Elizabeth Hand.

  The primary link between the moon and female nature is the approx-

  imately lunar pattern of the menstrual cycle, which secures a link between moon goddesses and erotic fantasy exemplified in such stories as Barry Pain’s “The Moon-Slave” (1901) and James Branch Cabell’s

  “The Music from behind the Moon” (1926). The moon is also linked in folklore to madness (“lunacy”), nonsense (“moonshine”), unlikelihood (“once in a b
lue moon”), and unattainability (“crying for the moon”). Its specific link with lycanthropy is of particular importance in fantasy lit-

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  erature, and a generalized transformative power is reflected in such works as Steven Millhauser’s Enchanted Night.

  Some classical writers wondered whether the moon might be the

  habitation of the souls of the dead, with the result that it sometimes figures in afterlife fantasies; in John Cowper Powys’s “The Mountains of the Moon” it plays host to the astral bodies of earthly dreamers. Children’s fantasies sometimes literalize the fanciful allegation that it is made of green cheese or employ the Man in the Moon (whose face or

  figure is supposedly discernible in its surface markings) as a character.

  In Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, everything wasted on Earth, including misspent time, broken vows, and unanswered prayers, is stored on the moon—a notion recalled or recycled by numerous later writers. Another significant literary precedent was set by Aleister Crowley’s Moonchild, whose central figure is echoed in various occult fantasies.

  MOORCOCK, MICHAEL (1939– ). British writer and editor. In the latter capacity, he was primarily associated with the new wave sf (refer to HDSFL) of New Worlds, but a key project of his early writing career was a sword and sorcery series that helped to revive, revitalize, and sophisticate that subgenre. His earliest experiments were reprinted in So-jan (1977), but the first to reach a considerable audience—in the magazine Science-Fantasy, where “The Dreaming City” appeared in 1961—were stories featuring the albino hero Elric of Melniboné, whose possession and use of the bloodthirsty sword Stormbringer places him at the focal point of a crucial contest in a long war between Order and Chaos.