The A to Z of Fantasy Literature

by Stableford, Brian M.

  The Elric stories collected in The Stealer of Souls (1963) and Stormbringer (1965) were revised and reedited more than once as the series expanded. A then-comprehensive version reissued by DAW Books in

  the 1970s was quickly supplemented by additional titles, but the series had become further complicated by its relocation in a broader context in which Elric became a version of an archetypal hero whose incarnations were elaborately distributed through an infinitely repetitive multiverse.

  “The Eternal Champion” ( Science-Fantasy, 1962) gave birth to a similar series; other series produced at high speed—including the Runestaff series, featuring Dorian Hawkmoon (1967–69), and its spinoff Count Brass series (1973–75), and two series featuring Prince Corum (1971

  and 1973–74)—were eventually bound up with it in a vast series of omnibuses uniting almost all Moorcock’s genre-relevant work as The Tale of the Eternal Champion (1992–93).

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  Volume 1 of The Tale of the Eternal Champion features Von Bek, whose adventures were first chronicled in the 1980s. Volume 2 is The Eternal Champion series, volume 3 Hawkmoon, and volume 4 Corum,

  whose second series of adventures is volume 10, The Prince of the Silver Hand. Elric’s adventures are distributed in volume 8, Elric of Melniboné, and volume 12, Stormbringer, while volume 14 features Count Brass. Most of the remaining volumes collect sf or science-fantasy stories, the most important of the latter being the decadent and far-futuristic fantasy sequence collected in volumes 7 and 11, The Dancers at the End of Time (originally 1972–76) and Legends from the End of Time (originally 1976). A few more fantasies are, however, included in the miscellany offered in volume 13 under the title Earl Aubec and Other Stories.

  The fantasies Moorcock did not include in this series of omnibuses include a trilogy of Edgar Rice Burroughs pastiches he produced in 1965; Gloriana, or the Unfulfill’d Queen (1978), a historical fantasy set in an alternative Elizabethan England; and the surreal urban fantasy couplet Mother London (1988) and King of the City (2000). His subsequent work in the genre includes a continuation of the Von Bek series, comprising Blood: A Southern Fantasy (1995), Fabulous Harbours (1995), and The War amongst the Angels (1996), and some of the stories in Lunching with the Anti-Christ (1995). He collaborated with Storm Constantine on Silverheart (2000) and began a new Elric series with The Dreamthief ’s Daughter (2000) and The Skrayling Tree (2003). Wizardry and Wild Romance: A Study of Epic Fantasy (1987) offers an idiosyncratic account of the nature of the fantasy genre and the methodol-ogy of fantasy writing.

  MOORE, C. L. (1911–1987). U.S. writer. Before her marriage to Henry Kuttner, she wrote two influential series for Weird Tales: the Northwest Smith sequence pioneered the hybrid/science fantasy (refer to HDSFL), while the Jirel of Joiry sequence was the first sword and sorcery series to feature a female hero. “Black God’s Kiss” (1934), which launched the latter series, is a remarkable erotic fantasy with symbolism and feverish purple prose that impressed A. Merritt, although he opined that Moore was bound to lose the relevant narrative energy once she was married (and presumably later thought the prediction amply justified). The series is reprinted in Jirel of Joiry (1969; aka Black God’s Shadow), although a story in which the two heroes meet, “The Quest of the Starstone” (1937 with Kuttner), was not included. Most of Moore’s

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  subsequent work was couched as science fantasy or sf (refer to HDSFL), but “Fruit of Knowledge” (1940) is an Edenic fantasy and “Daemon”

  (1946) a sentimental fantasy. Among the items she and Kuttner subsequently identified as collaborations, the portal fantasies with the most abundant fantasy content are probably mostly her work, especially the Merritt pastiche The Dark World (1946; book 1965) and the myth-based fantasies “Lands of the Earthquake” (1947) and The Mask of Circe (1948; book 1975).

  MÓR, CAISEAL (1961– ). Australian writer and musician; his expertise on the harp informs the historical Celtic fantasy trilogy comprising The Circle and the Cross (1995), The Song of the Earth (1996), and The Water of Life (1997); the trilogy comprising The Meeting of the Waters (2000), The King of Sleep (2000), and The Raven Game (2002) is a prequel. Carolan’s Concerto (1999) also features magical music. The Well of Yearning (2004) launched a new trilogy.

  MORALISTIC FANTASY. All worlds within texts have an intrinsic moral order, in that the author has the power to determine which characters will be rewarded or punished; what is meant by a “happy ending”

  is that virtue has been rewarded, according to the ideals of “poetic justice.” The primary work of the human imagination throughout history has been its resistance to the apparent lack of moral order in the real world; the bulk of fantasy literature’s “raw materials” must have arisen as means of pretending that moral accounts left achingly unsettled on Earth will be paid in full in the afterlife or in the wake of the apocalypse. All fantasy literature is therefore moralistic—but some items are more moralistic than others.

  Fables are designed to exemplify their morals, and such subgenres as religious fantasy and chivalric romance are also essentially moralistic; such narrative techniques as satire and allegory similarly have a moral component built in. The fantasies in which the moralistic aspect tends to stand out as a deliberate imposition are those in which fundamental materials are drawn from other traditions, which therefore have to be transfigured in order to emphasize a moral message; the cardinal example is Charles Perrault’s adaptation of folktales into fairy tales; the strategy was carried forward by such disciples as Madame de Genlis’s Tales of the Castle (1784; tr. 1806) and Anatole France’s Bee. Humorous fantasy was similarly adapted by such 19th-century writers as James Dalton and Charles Dickens.

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  Much fantastic apparatus has arisen from priestly and parental terrorism—the use of imaginary threats in persuading people to be cooperative. The most obvious literary produce of such crusades is to be found in horror fiction, but the tactics of parental terrorism—and opposition thereto—have had a profound effect on the evolution of children’s fantasy, starkly demonstrated by Heinrich Hoffmann’s graphic Struwwelpeter (1845) and Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio (1883), whose hapless wooden hero has a hard time acquiring the moral sensibility that will qualify him as a human being. Lene Kaaberbol’s series begun with The Shamer’s Daughter (2000; tr. from Danish 2002), in which the heroine can extract confessions with her censorious gaze, is slightly more subtle.

  MORGAN LE FAY. An enchantress in Arthurian legend, whose Anglo-Norman name identifies her as a fairy, although Malory represents her as Arthur’s half-sister; in William Morris’s Earthly Paradise she becomes the posthumous wife of another legendary hero, Ogier the Dane.

  Modern fantasy often represents her as Merlin’s rival, and she is a key character in much feminized fantasy; the heroine of Dion Fortune’s Sea Priestess (1938) and Moon Magic (1956) is her reincarnation, and she plays important roles in Arthurian transfigurations by such writers as Marion Zimmer Bradley, Vera Chapman, Fay Sampson, and Nancy Springer. Her role is also reassessed by such male writers as J. Robert King, in Le Morte d’Avalon (2003).

  Celtic Arthuriana occasionally links Morgan le Fay to the Morrigan, a spell-casting Irish war goddess who serves as a femme fatale in the legend of Cuchulainn, but the Morrigan’s roles in such novels as Alan Garner’s The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and Pat O’Shea’s The Hounds of the Morrigan (1985) are usually quite distinct, and the similarity of the names is almost certainly coincidental.

  MORLEY, CHRISTOPHER (1890–1957). U.S. writer. Where the Blue Begins (1922) is an offbeat animal fantasy. Thunder on the Left (1925) is a poignant wish-fulfillment fantasy in which a child’s desire to understand the mysteries of adulthood precipitates a timeslip with an effect that can only be tragically disenchanting. The brief sentimental fantasy The Arrow (1927) tends to an opposite extreme. The Trojan Horse (1957) is a satirical/classical fantasy.

  MORRIS, GERALD (?– ).
U.S. writer whose vocation as a Baptist pastor of the Living Water Christian Fellowship colors the moralistic com-

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  ponent of his series of Arthurian fantasies, featuring Gawain’s squire Terence. It comprises The Squire’s Tale (1998), The Squire, His Knight, and His Lady (1999), The Savage Damsel and the Dwarf (2000), Parsifal’s Page (2001), The Ballad of Sir Dinadin (2003), and The Princess, the Crone, and the Dung-Cart Knight (2004).

  MORRIS, JANET E. (1946– ). U.S. writer. Her novels of the late 1970s and early 1980s were couched as science fantasy (refer to HDSFL), although they were biased in their ambience toward the newly emergent fantasy genre, to which she committed herself wholeheartedly in a

  seven-volume sequence extending from Beyond Sanctuary (1985) to Storm Seed (1990, with Chris Morris) spun off from the Thieves’ World shared world series; the later volumes were written in collaboration with her husband, Chris. She then went on to develop an enterprising shared-world enterprise in collaboration with C. J. Cherryh, launched with the anthology Heroes in Hell (1986); the series cleverly adapted the backcloth of Dantean fantasy as a stage for violent adventures with ironic echoes of infernal comedy. The last of its anthologies was Prophets in Hell (1989); her more substantial contributions included The Gates of Hell (1986, with Cherryh), The Little Helliad (1988, with Chris Morris), and Explorers in Hell (1989, with David A. Drake).

  MORRIS, KENNETH (1879–1937). Welsh-born writer who spent the greater part of his adult life in a Californian community run by an offshoot of the Theosophical Society; most of his fiction—in which championship of the metaphysical principles of his faith is muted—was written for the organization’s publications, under various pseudonyms. A few mythologically syncretic moralistic fantasies, reminiscent of the work of Richard Garnett, were reprinted in The Secret Mountain and Other Tales (1926); a more comprehensive collection was assembled by Douglas A. Anderson as The Dragon Path (1995). The Celtic fantasies The Fates of the Princes of Dyved (1914) and Book of the Three Dragons (1930) begin as straightforward recyclings of the Mabinogion but diverge from the originals as their narrative momentum builds; the latter appears to be incomplete. The Chalchiuhite Dragon (1992) is a mythological fantasy set in pre-Columbian America.

  MORRIS, WILLIAM (1834–1896). British writer and artist, a member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. His outrage against the poor quality of mass-produced goods in the wake of the Industrial Revolution led him to campaign for socialism and for the conservation and further

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  sophistication of traditional craftsmanship—to which end he designed wallpaper, fabrics, and furniture and founded the Kelmscott Press to publish fine books.

  His early contributions to the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine included several neo-chivalric romances, the most significant being the allegorical novella “The Hollow Land” (1856), a portal fantasy featuring an Arcadian earthly paradise symbolic of the dreams of Art. Similar milieux and themes dominate his poetry, including Arthuriana in The Defence of Guinevere and Other Poems (1858) and the sequence of epics The Life and Death of Jason (1867), The Earthly Paradise (1868–70), and Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs (1876), which moved from classical to Nordic taproot texts, mingling the two in the intermediate title. After publishing the politically inspired visionary fantasy A Dream of John Ball (1888; initially combined with A King’s Lesson) he mingled verse with prose in The House of the Wolf-ings (1889), a mannered but realistic depiction of medieval life in which fantastic elements are marginal.

  The Roots of the Mountains (1890) makes even less use of fantastic intrusions, but its setting is detached from actual historical trappings, preparing the way for the development of the magically infused setting of The Story of the Glittering Plain; or, The Land of Living Men (1890), which elaborates and reassesses the theme of “The Hollow

  Land.” It was followed by a sequence of similar quest fantasies, three of which were reprinted by Lin Carter as significant ancestral texts of

  “adult fantasy.” In Carter’s view, Morris took up the cause that George MacDonald had pioneered in Phantastes and prepared the way for its further development by J. R. R. Tolkien. The Wood beyond the World (1894) introduces an element of erotic fantasy into the formula, but Morris found such material difficult and moved it away from the center of the more elaborate prose epic The Well at the World’s End (1896), in which a flexible employment of imaginary geography is

  much closer in spirit to that of genre fantasy than to the formalized allegorical representations of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. Between the two, he published the orthodox chivalric romance Child Christopher and Goldilind the Fair (1895). The Water of the Wondrous Isles (1897) is closer in spirit to Odyssean fantasy in the uncertain trajec-tory of its heroine’s wanderings. The similarly posthumous The Sun-dering Flood (1897) returned to the quasi-historical settings of his earlier novels.

  MROZEK, SLAVOMIR • 291

  The Kelmscott Press inspired the foundation of several other private presses, notably one operated by David Nutt, which published a good deal of Arthuriana and such chivalric romances as E. Hamilton Moore’s The Story of Etain and Otinel (1905).

  MORROW, JAMES (1947– ). U.S. writer. His early sf (refer to HDSFL) deploys motifs more commonly associated with fantasy; The Wine of Violence (1981) is a moralistic fantasy featuring a fluid that soaks up aggression, and The Continent of Lies (1984) is an Orphean fantasy about dream control. In This Is the Way the World Ends (1986), the spectral “un-admitted”—who lost the opportunity to be born because of an apocalyptic nuclear war—puts those responsible on trial. Morrow moved decisively into the field of Christian fantasy in Only Begotten Daughter (1990), a scathingly satirical account of a new incarnation. City of Truth (1991) is a fabular account of the city of Veritas, where truthfulness is compulsory, and its perverse but comforting opposite Satirev. In Towing Jehovah (1994), God commits suicide, but the angels and the Vatican attempt a cover-up. In the sequel Blameless in Abaddon (1996), charges are laid against the divine corpse in the Court of Human Rights, where problems of theodicy are hotly debated. In The Eternal Footman (1999), the blasting of God’s skull into orbit prompts a plague of death anxiety and an attempt to formulate a new, more up-to-date religion. The corrosive scepticism of these works is further reflected in the sarcastic series that provides the title sequence of Bible Stories for Adults (1996); further items are in The Cat’s Pajamas and Other Stories (2004). The journal Paradoxa dedicated a special issue (vol. 5, no. 12) to Morrow’s works in 1999.

  MORWOOD, PETER (1956– ). Pseudonym of British writer Robert Peter Smith. The series comprising The Horse Lord (1983), The Demon Lord (1984), The Dragon Lord (1986), and The Warlord’s Domain (1989) draws on Japanese mythology but offers stereotyped genre adventures rather than Oriental fantasy; a later version of the setting is featured in Greylady (1993) and Widowmaker (1989). The trilogy comprising Prince Ivan (1990), Firebird (1992), and The Golden Horde (1993) is a historical fantasy set in Russia. Morwood has also written tie-ins and contributions to shared world projects in collaboration with his wife, Diane Duane.

  MROZEK, SLAVOMIR (1930– ). Polish writer best known as a playwright, some of his absurdist dramas being translated in Six Plays

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  (1967) and The Emigrants (1974). In the latter, the characters create their own version of reality. Mrozek’s short fiction—including numerous satirical fabulations—is sampled in The Elephant (1957; tr. 1962) and The Ugupu Bird (1959–65; tr. 1968).

  MULTIVERSE. A vast array of parallel worlds; infinite versions inevitably contain all possible universes. Although the “many worlds interpretation” of quantum-mechanical uncertainties gives a gloss of scientific respectability to the notion—supporting its prolific use in sf (refer to HDSFL) as a frame for alternative histories—the term was popularized by Michael Moorcock, who used it to establish conceptual and metaphorical links between the highly various w
orlds described within his texts. Moorcock’s multiverse thus became an inherently

  chimerical superstructure hospitable to all kinds of fantasy, including elaborate exercises in metafiction like those undertaken in L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt’s Harold Shea series.

  The term had previously been used in the metaphysical fantasies of John Cowper Powys, and its use in fantasy tends to be more mystical than scientific, regarding the cosmic elements as experimental exercises in creation rather than accidental products of quantum fluctuation—an attitude dramatically clarified in such works as Diane Wynne Jones’s The Homeward Bounders and Ian Watson’s Queenmagic, Kingmagic.

  Other writers who have made significant use of multiverses include C.

  J. Cherryh, Tom de Haven, John Grant, Michael Scott Rohan, and James Stoddard.

  MUMMY. A corpse subjected to some kind of preservative process before interment; the archetypal examples are those entombed in ancient

  Egypt. Mummies provide a graphic imaginative link between present

  and past, and the notion that some of them might be revivable is commonly encountered in fantasy. In Jane Webb’s The Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty-second Century (1827), the revived mummy of Cheops is a sinister presence, but the theme is treated lightheartedly in such 19th-century tales as Edgar Allan Poe’s “Some Words with a Mummy” and Théophile Gautier’s “The Mummy’s Foot.” The occult revival prompted more earnest treatments, often with an element of erotic fantasy—including Edgar Lee’s Pharaoh’s Daughter (1889), Theo Douglas’s Iras: A Mystery (1896), and Clive Holland’s An Egyptian Co-quette (1898)—and licensed the use of mummies in such thrillers as Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Ring of Thoth” and “Lot No. 249,” Guy