“Jack Yeovil,” whose unusually inventive fantasy inclusions are
Drachenfels (1989), Beasts in Velvet (1991), and Genevieve Undead (1993). In Life’s Lottery: A Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Book (1999), the reader decides which of numerous alternative lives the hero has to endure. Newman’s short fiction is collected in The Original Dr Shade and Other Stories (1994), Famous Monsters (1995), Seven Stars (2000), and Unforgivable Stories (2000).
NICHOLLS, STAN (?– ). British writer. The Nightshade Chronicles, comprising The Book of Shadows (1996), The Shadow of a Sorcerer (1997), and A Gathering of Shadows (1998), pit a one-armed hero against a sorcerer. The trilogy comprising Bodyguard of Lightning (1999), The Legion of Thunder (1999), and Warriors of the Tempest (2000) represent orcs as the victims of prejudice and a bad press. The trilogy begun with Quicksilver Rising (2003) and Quicksilver Zenith (2004) features an accursed wanderer caught between rival empires.
NICHOLSON, JOSEPH SHIELD (1850–1927). British writer who published three anonymous fantasy novels. Thoth (1888) describes a tech-
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nologically advanced but decadent lost race coexistent with Periclean Athens. A Dreamer of Dreams (1889) is a moralistic/Faustian fantasy.
Toxar (1890) is a striking wish-fulfillment fantasy in which an em-pathically gifted slave tells his masters what they want to know in order that warped ambition might lead them to destruction.
NICHOLSON, WILLIAM (1948– ). British writer best known as a screenwriter. In the trilogy of children’s fantasies comprising The Wind Singer (2000), Slaves of the Mastery (2001), and Firesong (2002), refugees from the highly regulated city of Amaranth venture into the surrounding wilderness in search of a solution to its mysterious afflic-tions but find their mission frustratingly difficult.
NIMMO, JENNY (1944– ). British writer of children’s fiction, much of which employs magical animals as agents or catalysts of change. The Bronze Trumpeter (1974) is a timeslip fantasy featuring the cast of the commedia dell’arte. The portal fantasy trilogy comprising The Snow Spider (1986), Emlyn’s Moon (1987; aka Orchard of the Crescent Moon), and The Chestnut Soldier (1989) makes enterprising use of imagery derived from the Mabinogion. Griffin’s Castle (1994) has wild beasts summoned from a stone wall. In Ultramarine (1991) and its sequel Rainbow and Mr Zed (1992), a mysterious man from the sea explains the heroine’s unusual ancestry. The Rinaldi Ring (1999) features a ghost girl from World War I. Milo’s Wolves (2001) and The Night of the Unicorn (2003) revisit Nimmo’s favorite theme. The series begun with Midnight for Charlie Bone (2002), The Time Twister (2003; aka Charlie Bone and the Time Twister), and The Blue Boa (2004; aka Charlie Bone and the Invisible Boy) is a J. K. Rowling–influenced account of the exploits of a boy who can hear the thoughts of people in photographs at a special academy.
NIX, GARTH (1963– ). Australian writer. The Ragwitch (1991) is a dark Orphean fantasy. Sabriel (1995) describes the problematic traffic passing through a wall separating a nonmagical region of an imaginary continent from territories where aberrant afterlives may be generated. The sequel couplet Lirael: Daughter of the Clayr (2001) and Abhorsen (2003) begins 14 years later. The series comprising The Seventh Tower: The Fall (2000), Castle (2000), Aenir (2000), Above the Veil (2001), Into Battle (2001), and The Violet Keystone (2001) tracks the exploits of a boy who falls out of a tower and has to learn the secrets of the dark
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world outside. In the Keys to the Kingdom series, launched with Mister Monday (2003), Grim Tuesday (2003), and Drowned Wednesday (2004), the will defining the inheritance of a magical kingdom is torn into seven pieces.
NODIER, CHARLES (1780–1844). French writer who became the guiding light of the French Romantic movement, hosting its first cénacle.
He helped the director of the Porte-Saint-Martin theater, Jean-Toussaint Merle, improvise dramas based on a number of Gothic romances, including an 1820 version of John Polidori’s The Vampyre—in which steamboat pioneer Achille de Jouffroy also had a hand—and Le Monstre et le Magicien (1826), adapted from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
Nodier’s prose fantasies include the hallucinatory fantasy Smarra (1821; tr. 1993) and the art fairy tales Trilby (1822; tr. 1895) and La fée aux miettes [The Crumb-Fairy] (1832).
NONSENSE. The production of nonsense as a calculated literary art form was popularized by the humorous verse of Edward Lear and taken up by Lewis Carroll, although earlier precedents can be found—notably Jacques Cazotte’s A Thousand and One Follies and Horace Walpole’s bizarre Hieroglyphic Tales (1785). The 19th-century tradition founded by Lear and Carroll was extended by W. S. Gilbert, F. Anstey, James F. Sullivan, and Rudyard Kipling (in his Just So Stories) but became less obvious in the 20th century, despite G. K. Chesterton’s championship in “A Defence of Nonsense” (1901) and Oscar Wilde’s lament for “The Decay of Lying.” The main reason for this retreat was the collapse of Victorian rigidity, but nonsense retained a muted presence within British extensions of surrealism. Such eccentricities as John Cowper Powys’s “suckfist gibberish” and J. L. Synge’s mathematical fantasia Kandelman’s Krim (1957) maintained a presence until nonsense made a more robust comeback in the work of such writers as Terry Pratchett and Jeff Noon.
In the United States, Prohibition and its associated prudery provided a rigid moral stance ripe for nonsensical assault in the works of such writers as Thorne Smith; and the tradition was carried forward by the likes of James Thurber before infecting modern humorous fantasy; notable examples of modern American nonsense can be found in the
works of Edward Gorey and Daniel M. Pinkwater. Examples from other languages pose problems for translators, but a nonsensical spirit is evident in the works of Tove Jansson.
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The kind of “sense” from which nonsense dissents is ideological—
which is to say that it tries to pass itself off as something that is “naturally true” although it is, in fact, mere pretense—and the assaults of nonsense are akin to those of satire, although they attack the roots rather than the branches of the relevant ideological formations. In its ultimate developments, in such Pratchett novels as Hogfather and The Thief of Time, the careful extrapolation of “nonsensical” premises is a powerful and thoroughly rational form of scepticism that has the additional advantage of being very witty.
NOON, JEFF (1957– ). British writer whose hectic surrealist fictions make abundant use of imagery drawn from sf (refer to HDSFL), although they became more assertively chimerical after Nymphomation (1997) and Automated Alice (1996), following a method explained in Cobralingus (2000). Pixel Juice (1998) assembles 50 short pieces into a kaleidoscopic mosaic.
NORDIC FANTASY. Fantasies based in northern European mythology.
The most substantial mythical network involves a population of gods known as the Aesir—including Odin, Thor, Loki, and Baldur—in a long war with invading Vanir, which also involves the dwarfs of Alfheim (from whose name the word elf is derived) and the giants of Jotunheim.
The ultimate climax of the war is the battle of Ragnarok—described in the 10th-century Icelandic poem Völuspá—which completes the götterdämmerung [“twilight of the gods”]. The 10th-century records are much elaborated in an account of the Norse gods interpolated in a manual for Icelandic poets, now known as the Prose Edda, compiled by Snorri Sturluson in the early 13th century. The near-contemporary Teutonic Niebelunglied and Scandinavian Volsunga Saga complete the set of key taproot texts. Other northern European myths and legends that have survived, thanks to early literary recyclings, include the hero myth of Beowulf and a Finnish cycle belatedly incorporated into the Kalevala.
The Icelandic cycle was a vital source for William Morris and provided raw materials extensively transfigured by J. R. R. Tolkien, while the Teutonic cycle was revitalized and reinterpreted by German romanticism, including the operatic interpretations of Richard Wagner. Icelandic sagas provided useful models for heroic fantasy, employed
in Rider Haggard’s Eric Brighteyes and E. R. Eddison’s The Worm Ouroboros. Henrik Ibsen’s dramatic poem Peer Gynt (1867) borrows many of its allegorical figures from Scandinavian folktales. Modern
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writers who have made notable use of Nordic materials include Poul Anderson, Stephan Grundy, Nigel Frith, Dennis McKiernan, Mickey Zucker Reichert, and Elizabeth H. Boyer. Bernard King’s trilogy Starkadder (1985), Vargr-Moon (1986), and Death-Blinder (1988) is one of the more graphic transfigurations of Nordic mythology’s violent imagery, while Patricia Elliott’s The Ice Boy (2002) finds a kinder face in recycling the hopeful myth of Baldur; Lois Tilton’s celebration of Loki in Written in Venom is an offbeat exercise in literary satanism.
NORTON, ANDRE (1912–2005). U.S. writer who began writing fantasies in the 1930s; the two novellas making up Garan the Eternal (1972) date from that era. She recycled medieval romances for children in Rogue Reynard (1947) and Huon of the Horn (1951) before turning to sf (refer to HDSFL). When her work became popular she moved back toward fantasy in such hybrid creations as Witch World (1963), about a parallel world where magical powers are cosmetically rationalized; the series extending from it eventually became a shared world. Norton’s solo contributions are Web of the Witch World (1964), Year of the Unicorn (1965), Three against the Witch World (1965), Warlock of the Witch World (1967), Sorceress of the Witch World (1968), The Crystal Gryphon (1972), Spell of the Witch World (1972), The Jargoon Pard (1974), Trey of Swords (1977), Zarsthor’s Bane (1978), Lore of the Witch World (1980), Gryphon in Glory (1981), Horn Crown (1981),
’Ware Hawk (1983), The Gate of the Cat (1987), and The Wardling of Witch World (1996), the last-named being part of a Secrets of the Witch World series, mostly written by others.
Norton dispensed with hybridizing devices in a series displacing child characters into a variety of historical and imaginary settings, comprising Steel Magic (1965; aka Gray Magic), Octagon Magic (1967), Fur Magic (1968), Dragon Magic (1972), Lavender-Green Magic (1974), and Red Hart Magic (1976). A similar pattern recurs in Here Abide Monsters (1973). The poignant quest fantasy The Hand of Llyr (1994) is more ambitious, as are Mirror of Destiny (1995), in which a war between humanity and the inhabitants of Faerie is narrowly averted, and The Monster’s Legacy (1996), in which an apprentice embroiderer flees to mountains formerly guarded by a magical beast. Wind in the Stone (1999) is an Orphean fantasy.
Norton wrote Black Trillium with Julian May and Marion Zimmer Bradley, her own sequel being Golden Trillium (1993). Her other col-
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laborative endeavors outside the Witch World sequence include novels written with Phyllis Miller and Mercedes Lackey, the alternative history fantasy The Shadow of Albion (1999 with Rosemary Edghill), and a sequence including To the King a Daughter (2000, Knight or Knave
[2001]) and A Crown Disowned (2002) written with Sasha Miller. Norton’s fondness for cats is expressed in many of her works, especially Mark of the Cat (1994) and five Catfantastic anthologies (1989–99).
Her short fiction is collected in The Many Worlds of Andre Norton (1974; aka the Book of Andre Norton), High Sorcery (1970), Perilous Dreams (1976), Moon Mirror (1988), Grand Master’s Choice (1989), and Wizards’ Worlds (1989).
NORTON, MARY (1903–1992). British writer best known for a popular series of children’s fantasies featuring diminutive scavengers, comprising The Borrowers (1952), The Borrowers Afield (1955), The Borrowers Afloat (1959), The Borrowers Aloft (1961), the brief Poor Stainless (1966; book 1971, aka The Last Borrowers’ Story), and The Borrowers Avenged (1982). She had earlier written The Magic Bed-Knob (1943) and its sequel Bonfires and Broomsticks (1947), which are better known under their omnibus title Bedknob and Broomsticks (1957). In the portal fantasy Are All the Giants Dead? (1975), the sceptical protagonist discovers the world to which fairy tale characters have retired.
NOSTRADAMUS (1503–1566). French lifestyle fantasist who published a volume of 353 oracular quatrains in 1555, subsequently extending the catalogue to 1,040, each one allegedly referring—with calculated ambiguity, obliquity, and obfuscation—to a single year of future history. The flexibility of their meaning has allowed serial rereadings of his works to be fitted to the expanding historical record—every manufactured hit increasing his reputation—resulting in a growing number of cameo appearances in historical fantasies, such as the one in James Morrow’s This Is the Way the World Ends. He is central to the screen-play-based Nostradamus (1996), by Knut Boeser, but peripheral to Judith Merkle Riley’s The Master of All Desires. Modern scholarly fantasies devoted to his work are very numerous; David Ovason’s Secrets of Nostradamus (1997) is one of the more ingenious.
NOYES, ALFRED (1880–1958). British poet who tried to keep the flickering flame of romanticism alight in the 20th century. He compiled The Magic Casement: An Anthology of Fairy Verse (1908) and produced an early study of William Morris (1908). There are some fantasies in the
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short-story collections Walking Shadows (1918) and The Hidden Player (1924). The Secret of Pooduck Island (1943) is a children’s fantasy.
The Devil Takes a Holiday (1955) is an ambivalent exercise in literary satanism.
NYE, JODY LYNN (1957– ). U.S. writer. In The Magic Touch (1996), a high school graduate is accepted into the Fairy Godmothers’ Union as a trainee and discovers talent for making wishes come true. The transition from school to the “real” world is also modeled in two series of humorous fantasies, one comprising Mythology 101 (1990), Mythology Abroad (1991), Higher Mythology (1993), and Advanced Mythology (1999), the other Waking in Dreamland (1998), School of Light (1999), and The Grand Tour (2000). She has also written several tie-ins and worked in collaboration with Robert Lynn Asprin.
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O’BRIEN, FLANN (1911–1966). Pseudonym of Irish writer Brian O’Nolan, who wrote irreverent polemical journalism as “Myles na
Gopaleen.” His first novel, At Swim-Two-Birds (1939), is a marvelously complicated metafiction with intrusions of Celtic fantasy. The Third Policeman (written 1939–40; pub. 1967) is a surreal and sarcastic posthumous fantasy. The Dalkey Archive (1964) transplants some of its text into an absurdist fantasy about a mad scientist whose mastery of time threatens to precipitate the apocalypse.
OCCULT FANTASY. Occult means “hidden”; occult fantasy involves quests to uncover or recover the kinds of concealed knowledge to which scholarly fantasists throughout history have claimed to have access, including the secrets of alchemy, Rosicrucianism, the Jewish Cabala, and various other aspects of a loosely knit “hermetic tradition” said to have descended from the legendary Hermes Trismegistus. There was
considerable interest in occult matters among Renaissance scholars, whose activities laid the groundwork for a further “occult revival” following the corrosions of the Age of Reason and the Age of Enlightenment. That new celebration began with the Gothic boom and romanticism, gathering pace throughout the 19th century; this revival was assisted as well as reflected by the depiction of Gothic villains equipped with occult knowledge—often won by Faustian means—in the earnest
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occult fantasies of such writers as Edward Bulwer-Lytton and Honoré de Balzac, and such thrillers as Hume Nisbet’s The Great Secret (1895), The Master of the Magicians (1890, by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps and Herbert D. Ward), and F. Marion Crawford’s The Witch of Prague.
By the end of the century, the best-selling works of Marie Corelli were the tip of a huge conglomerate iceberg, whose components included spiritualist and theosophical fantasy. Literary fantasies fed gluttonously on a boom in scholarly fantasies, as did such lifestyle fantasists as the members of the Order of the Golden Dawn, who in-
cluded—mostly on a temporary basis—Arthur Machen, W. B. Yeats, A. E. Waite, Aleister Crowley, and Dion Fortune as well as the surrealist painter Ithell Colquhoun, who chronicled its history in The Sword of Wisdom: MacGregor Mathers an
d the Golden Dawn (1975).
The omnivorously syncretic spirit of such organizations, reflected in such works as John Symonds’s The Guardian of the Threshold, was continued by such hybridizers as Kenneth Grant, who found significant inspirational parallels between the work of Crowley and H. P. Lovecraft, lending a new dimension to Lovecraftian fiction, as reflected in some of the novels of the prolific scholarly fantasist Colin Wilson, notably The Philosopher’s Stone (1969).
An inextricable confusion of overt and covert fantasy continues in such ambiguous occult fantasies as David Ovason’s The Zelator: The Secret Journals of Mark Hedsel (1999), difficulties shrewdly observed by such convoluted metafictions as Peter Ackroyd’s The House of Doctor Dee and Robert Irwin’s Satan Wants Me. The late 20th-century boom in secret history novels contributed to a new resurgence of occult fantasy in such works as Arturo Perez-Reverte’s The Dumas Club (1993; tr. 1996) and Steven Kotler’s The Angle Quickest for Flight (1999).
ODOEVSKY, VLADIMIR (1804–1869). Russian writer who imported the seeds of German romanticism into his homeland, where they fell on stony ground. He published two collections of stories, one translated as Russian Nights (1833; tr. 1965) and the second (1844) sampled in The Salamander and Other Gothic Tales (1992). The latter’s most significant inclusions are the striking alchemical fantasies “The Sylph”
(1837), “The Cosmorama” (1839), and “The Salamander” (1841).
O’DONOHOE, NICK (1952– ). U.S. writer. His fantasies include the Crossroads series, comprising The Magic and the Healing (1994),
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Under the Healing Sign (1995), and The Healing of Crossroads (1996), in which healers venture into the only secondary world in which unicorns and other magical creatures can thrive—which inevitably comes under threat as traffic increases. The enterprising humorous fantasy The Gnomewrench in the Dwarfworks (1999) features an underworld of dwarves recruited by the Allies during World War II; The Gnomewrench in the Peopleworks (2000) is a sequel.
The A to Z of Fantasy Literature Page 49
