The A to Z of Fantasy Literature

by Stableford, Brian M.

  ODYSSEAN FANTASY. By virtue of his starring role in Homer’s epics, Odysseus (Ulysses, in Roman texts) became an archetype of ingenious and long-suffering heroism and one of the key symbolic figures of fantasy literature. The subgenre of Odyssean fantasy extends from straightforward recyclings and transfigurations to embrace all stories of wanderers who must overcome awkward obstacles in order to return

  home—as stranded protagonists of portal fantasy often have to do. The margins of the subgenre broaden to accommodate all stories of much-tried wanderers whose objectives involve some kind of quest for personal “completion.” Other characters from the Odyssey who recur with some frequency in modern fantasy include the monstrous cyclops, the lotus eaters, and the enchantress Circe.

  Notable transfigurations of the Odyssey, or incidents therefrom, include James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), Eden Phillpotts’s “Circe’s Island,”

  John Erskine’s Penelope’s Man, Ernst Schnabel’s The Voyage Home (1958), and Daniel Evan Weiss’s Honk If You Love Aphrodite (2000).

  Sequels by other hands include François Fénélon’s Telemachus (1699), The World’s Desire by H. Rider Haggard and Andrew Lang, John Cowper Powys’s Atlantis, and Nikos Kazantzakis’s The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel (1938; tr. 1958). Odyssean fantasies of a broader stripe include L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Barbara Hambly’s The Rainbow Abyss, Diana Wynne Jones’s The Homeward Bounders, Isabel Allende’s City of the Beasts, Paul Stewart’s Edge Chronicles, and D. J. MacHale’s Bobby Pendragon series, launched

  with The Merchant of Death (2002).

  OFFUTT, ANDREW J. (1934– ). U.S. writer. His early work was mostly sf, but the planetary romances Messenger of Zhuvastou and Ardor on Aros (both 1973) moved decisively into fantasy, pastiching, and parodying the excesses of Edgar Rice Burroughs and Robert E. Howard.

  Further exercises in the same hybrid vein include Chieftain of Andor (1976, aka Clansman of Andor), My Lord Barbarian (1977), King

  ORIENTAL FANTASY • 309

  Dragon (1980), Deathknight (1990), and The Shadow of Sorcery (1993).

  Sword of the Gael (1975) launched a series featuring one of Howard’s less famous heroes, but the Conan parody The Black Sorcerer of the Black Castle (1976) was followed by several contributions to the ever-extending Conan series. With Richard K. Lyon, Offutt wrote a sword and sorcery trilogy comprising Demon in the Mirror (1978), Eyes of Sarsis (1980), and War of the Spider (1981); the solo trilogy comprising The Iron Lords (1979), Shadows Out of Hell (1980) and The Lady of the Snowmist (1983) is similar. He also edited a series of sword and sorcery anthologies, Swords against Darkness (5 vols., 1977–79).

  ONIONS, OLIVER (1873–1961). British writer. Most of his short fantasies are horror stories (refer to HDHL), but his novels include the time reversal story The Tower of Oblivion (1921); A Certain Man (1931), about a man who acquires a magical suit of clothes; the Gothic fantasy The Hand of Kornelius Voyt (1939); and A Shilling to Spend (1965), about a self-perpetuating coin. His wife, Berta Ruck

  (1878–1978), wrote the cautionary wish-fulfillment fantasy The Immortal Girl (1925).

  ORIENTAL FANTASY. A fantasy set in the Far East. “The Orient” used to include North Africa, especially for French writers, but Arabian fantasy is here considered a separate category, Oriental fantasy being restricted to Asia; Hindu mythology is also isolated as a subcategory. Important taproot texts for Oriental fantasy include the Indian epics the Ramayana (c500 BC) and the Mahabharata (c400 BC–AD 400) and Wu Che’ng-en’s 16th-century epic Journey to the West, or Monkey (tr.

  1942). Japanese mythology was popularized in the West by Lafcadio Hearn, who recycled some material from late 18th-century tales by Ak-inari Ueda, sampled in Tales of Rain and Moon (1974). Accounts of real and fictitious journeys to the Orient—the latter ranging from The Marvellous Adventures of Sir John Maundeville (c1355) to Gérard de Nerval’s Journey to the Orient and Eça de Queiroz’s The Mandarin (1880; tr. from Portuguese 1993)—provided a flow of inspiration for Oriental fantasy.

  Notable contributors to the subgenre include Ernest Bramah, Lily Adams Beck, Sax Rohmer, Talbot Mundy, Frank Owen, E. Hoffman Price, Charles G. Finney, Kara Dalkey, Jessica Amanda Salmonson, and Eric van Lustbader; other notable works include Margarite Yourcenar’s Oriental Tales, Richard Lupoff’s Sword of the

  310 • ORPHEAN FANTASY

  Demon (1977); Graham Diamond’s Samarkand (1980), Samarkand Dawn (1981), and Cinnabar (1985); Barry Hughart’s Bridge of Birds (1984), The Story of the Stone (1988), and Eight Skilled Gentlemen (1991); Stephen Marley’s Spirit Mirror (1988), Mortal Mask (1991), and Shadow Sisters (1993); Kij Johnson’s The Fox Woman (2000) and Fudoki (2003); Lian Hearn’s Across the Nightingale Floor (2002), Grass for his Pillow (2003), and Brilliance of the Moon (2004); and Leah R. Cutter’s Paper Mage.

  Notable Oriental fantasies by writers of Oriental descent include various items by S. P. Somtow and Laurence Yep, M. Lucie Chin’s The Fairy of Ku-She (1988), Larissa Lai’s When Fox Is a Thousand (1995), Kenji Nakagami’s Snakelust (1999), Alvin Lu’s The Hell Screens (2000), Atiq Rahimi’s Earth and Ashes (1999; tr. 2002), and Hiromi Goto’s The Kappa Child (2001).

  ORPHEAN FANTASY. According to legend, Orpheus was a Thracian minstrel, the son of the muse Calliope, whose music upon the lyre was said to charm wild beasts. He traveled with the Argonauts, drowning out in one incident the song of the sirens. A good deal of modern fantasy invokes his name as a symbol of the quasi-magical power of music, but the subgenre of Orphean fantasy is primarily derived from his journey into the underworld in search of his wife Eurydice; Orpheus won her a reprieve but lost it again by breaching an ambiguous injunction. The subgenre takes in any similar quest to recover a loved one, including parents, siblings, children, or close friends. An early recycling of the story is Marie de France’s Sir Orfeo, which transfigures it as a chivalric romance. Other notable transfigurations include Jean Cocteau’s play Orphée (1927), Constantine Fitzgibbon’s The Golden Age (1975), Russell Hoban’s The Medusa Frequency, Francesca Lia Block’s Ecstasia, and Chet Williamson’s Second Chance (2002). Notable examples of the broader genre include John Gordon’s The Edge of the World (1983), Edith Pattou’s Hero’s Song (1991), and Fire Arrow (1997), Salman Rushdie’s The Ground beneath Her Feet, and Chris Wooding’s Poison.

  OWEN, FRANK (1893–1968). U.S. writer who also used the pseudonym

  “Roswell Williams.” His oriental novels The House Mother (1929), Rare Earth (1931), and The Scarlet Hill (1941) have only fugitive elements of fantasy, but the lapidary short stories in The Wind That Tramps the World (1929) and The Purple Sea (1930) are far more explicit. Those in Della Wu, Chinese Courtezan and Other Oriental Love Tales (1931)

  PAN • 311

  and A Husband for Kutani (1938) are longer and less fantastic, but the latter includes the notable alchemical fantasy “Doctor Shen Fu.” The Porcelain Magician (1948) is an eclectic sampler. Owen also wrote several collections of children’s fantasies with his wife Ethel, including Coat Tales from the Pockets of the Happy Giant (1927), The Dream Hills of Happy Country (1928), Windblown Stories (1930), and The Blue Highway (1932). Ethel Owen’s solo works in a similar vein include The Pumpkin People (1927) and Hallowe’en Tales & Games (1928).

  OZICK, CYNTHIA (1928– ). U.S. writer. Her short fiction includes numerous items of Jewish fantasy, some of which are collected in The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories (1971). Items of a similar ilk are mingled with other materials, in Bloodshed and Three Novellas (1976) and Lev-itation: Five Fictions (1982). In The Puttermesser Papers (1997), a woman constructs a golem.

  – P –

  PAIN, BARRY (1864–1928). British writer best known as a humorist.

  Most of his collections contain some whimsical fantasies, the most notable items including “The Celestial Grocery” in In a Canadian Canoe (1891), “The Glass of Supreme Moments” in Stories and Interludes (1891), the erotic fantasy “The Moon-Slave” in Stories in the Dark (1901), and “The Tree of D
eath” in Short Stories of Today and Yesterday (1928). The One Before (1902) is an Ansteyan comedy tracking the chaos caused by a ring that causes everyone who puts it on to take on the personalities of its previous wearer. An Exchange of Souls (1911) is a hybrid/science fantasy about an experiment in personality transfer.

  The title novella of The New Gulliver and Other Stories (1913) is a grotesque satire. The allegorical Going Home: Being the Fantastic Romance of the Girl with Angel Eyes and the Man Who Had Wings (1921) is an unusual sentimental fantasy.

  PAN. The god of Arcadia. He became a frequent presence in late 19th-century English literature by virtue of his identification with both the seductive and frightening aspects of “nature,” which made him a convenient symbolic adversary of civilization and progress. His utility was further increased by the appropriation of his physical appearance into Christian images of the Devil, making him a key figure of disguised literary

  312 • PAOLINI, CHRISTOPHER

  satanism. He became a key figure in the iconography of the Aesthetic movement; hymns of praise dedicated to him include Oscar Wilde’s

  “Pan” (1881) and Edgar Jepson’s The Horned Shepherd, while Henry Nevinson’s The Plea of Pan (1901) and Eden Phillpotts’s Pan and the Twins offered more cautious endorsements. His invocation became a central pillar of the lifestyle fantasies of Aleister Crowley and Dion Fortune. His sinister aspects are conserved in such stories as Arthur Machen’s “The Great God Pan,” E. F. Benson’s The Angel of Pain (1905), Alice and Claude Askew’s The Devil and the Crusader (1909), Stephen McKenna’s The Oldest God (1926), and Lord Dunsany’s The Blessing of Pan. More recent manifestations—including Tom Robbins’s Jitterbug Perfume and Donna Jo Napoli’s The Great God Pan—

  continue to make much of his ambiguity.

  Pan’s associates, the satyrs (fauns, in Roman terminology), are routinely confused with the drunken Sileni similarly associated with Diony-sus, whose singular incarnation Silenus became the central figure of the

  “satyr plays” ancestral to the tradition of satire. European writers like Anatole France, Rémy de Gourmont, Théo Varlet, Ruben Dario, and Fernando Pessoa used them in the way that British writers used Pan (1888–1935); British representations, like Arthur Ransome’s “The Ageing Faun” (1912) and Oswald Couldrey’s “The Inquisitive Satyr”

  (1914) tend to diminish them to ineffectual cuteness; Norman Douglas’s In the Beginning is more respectful. Their female counterparts in Arcadia, the nymphs, are less well represented, although dryads—

  nymphs associated with groves or individual trees—crop up in such

  sentimental fantasies as Justin McCarthy’s The Dryad (1905), A. Merritt’s “The Woman of the Wood” (1926), and E. V. de Fontmell’s Forbidden Marches (1929).

  PAOLINI, CHRISTOPHER (1984– ). U.S. wunderkind whose novel Er-agon (2003; book 2004)—the first part of the Inheritance trilogy—was self-published on his alagaesia.com website before being extensively publicized by a commercial publisher. Its youthful hero finds a mysterious stone, which draws him into an epic adventure with dragons, elves, and various monsters; he eventually finds his vocation as a dragon rider.

  PARALLEL WORLD. A world situated “alongside” our own. The most obvious mythical examples are Faerie and the classical underworld.

  Movement between the primary world and parallel secondary worlds forms the basis of most modern portal fantasies. The notion was com-

  PARANORMAL ROMANCE • 313

  plicated in the 19th century by pseudoscientific notions of an “astral plane” and the mathematical jargon of “dimensions,” the latter allowing its adoption into sf (refer to HDSFL)—which soon took aboard the idea of an infinite multiverse of parallel worlds.

  PARANORMAL ROMANCE. A nascent subgenre of generic romantic

  fiction that began a spectacular period of growth in the 1990s, inspired by the success of timeslip romances by such writers as Barbara Erskine. Extreme sentimental fantasies had long embodied the conviction that love can defy the laws of nature—a conviction maintained even by such sceptical analyses of the mythology of modern romance as Margaret Irwin’s These Mortals—but commodified romantic fiction remained stubbornly naturalistic until the 1980s, with occasional rare (and bizarre) exceptions like H. M. E. Clamp’s Rebel Angels (c1936). Even the poplar U.S. subgenre of “Gothic romances” rarely admitted supernatural materials, in spite of the example set by tie-ins to the successful supernatural TV soap opera Dark Shadows.

  A significant threshold was crossed when the prominent genre writer Nora Roberts published the timeslip romance trilogy begun with Time Was (1989). Several of her peers, including Madeline Baker, began to produce timeslip romances on a regular basis—Baker’s, begun with

  Whisper in the Wind (1991), brought western settings into the hybrid mix. Romance publishers issued several Christmas fantasy anthologies in the early 1990s, including A Christmas Kiss (Zebra, 1992) and Angel Christmas (Topaz, 1995), testing the market further with such hybrid anthologies as Dreamscape (Harlequin, 1993), Enchanted Crossings (Love Spell, 1994), Love Potion (Jove, 1995), Timeswept Brides (Jove, 1996), and Bewitched (Jove, 1997).

  Madeline Baker attached the byline “Amanda Ashley” to a long se-

  ries of vampire romances, begun with Embrace the Night (1995). Another writer of vampire romances, Maggie Shayne, began a similar series featuring witches with Eternity (1998). One popular subgenre ripe for such crossovers was the Regency romance, which was supernaturalized in such novels as Sandra Heath’s Marigold’s Marriages (1999) and Barbara Metzger’s Miss Treadwell’s Talent (1999) and The Painted Lady (2001). The range continued to broaden in such anthologies as Faery Magic (Zebra, 1998), Haunting Hearts (Jove, 1998), and Once upon a Rose (2001). Zebra’s Once upon a Waltz (2001), featuring Regency fantasies, was quickly followed by Kensington’s His Eternal Kiss (2002), featuring Regency vampires. Out of This World (Jove, 2001) took in

  314 • PAXSON, DIANA L.

  Roberts’s sf byline “J. D. Robb” and Laurel K. Hamilton. By this time, the Romance Writers of America had a Paranormal Special Interest

  chapter and introduced a “Paranormal” category into its annual awards, thus securing the nascent subgenre’s name.

  Most paranormal romances retained intrusive and portal fantasy frameworks to begin with, but the secondary worlds of immersive fantasy offered such perfect venues for rags-to-riches romance that almost all commodified fantasies included romance subplots. When Tor and the Harlequin imprint Silhouette launched labeled paranormal romance lines in 2004, they dramatically increased the scope for the introduction of immersive generic romances. Silhouette tested the possibility in two anthologies trailing the new line in 2003; the authors in Charmed Destinies included Mercedes Lackey and sf writer Catherine Asaro, while When Darkness Falls featured Tanith Lee. Asaro went to write The Charmed Sphere (2004) and edit a further showcase anthology of generic hybrids, Irresistible Forces (2004).

  Other writers who have made notable contributions to the subgenre

  include Caroline Stevermer, Anne Logston, Karen Fox, and Kristine Kathryn Rusch (as Katherine Grayson). Notable Regency hybrids include Karen Harbaugh’s trilogy Cupid’s Mistake (1997), Cupid’s Darts (1998), and Cupid’s Kiss (1999). Vampire romances include Mary Jan-ice Davidson’s Undead and Unwed (2004) and Katie MacAlister’s Sex and the Single Vampire (2004). Timeslip romances include R. Garcia y Robertson’s Knight Errant (2001) and Lady Ribyn (2003). Garthia Anderson’s Spellbound in Seattle (2003) is an alternative history romance. Julie Kenner’s Aphrodite’s Kiss (2001), Aphrodite’s Passion (2002), Aphrodite’s Secret (2003), and Aphrodite’s Flame (2004) are fantasized mystery romances.

  The fantasization of commodified romantic fiction inevitably brought the mythology of romantic love into sharper focus; exaggerating its ideological assumptions could not help but call them into question. Inevitably, the boom in paranormal romance immediately called forth

  such cynical responses as d. g. k. gol
dberg’s . . . Doomed to Repeat It (2002).

  PAXSON, DIANA L. (1943– ). U.S. writer. The series comprising Lady of Light (1983), Lady of Darkness (1983), Silverhair the Wanderer (1986), The Earthstone (1987), The Sea Star (1988), The Wind Crystal (1990), and The Jewel of Fire (1992) is set in California in the wake of a catastrophe that has paved the way for a magical renaissance.

  PENNICOTT, JOSEPHINE • 315

  Brisingamen (1984) and The Paradise Tree (1987) are contemporary fantasies set in the same milieu. The Celtic fantasy White Mare, Red Stallion (1986) and the Arthurian fantasy The White Raven (1988) were followed by a trilogy of a similar ilk recycling the legend of Finn MacCool, written with Adrienne Martine-Barnes: Master of Earth and Water (1993), The Shield between the Worlds (1994), and Sword of Fire and Shadow (1995).

  The Serpent’s Tooth (1991) is a Shakespearean fantasy. The trilogy comprising The Wolf and the Raven (1993), The Dragons of the Rhine (1995), and The Lord of Horses is a Nordic fantasy recycling the Ni-belunglied. The Hallowed Isle series, comprising The Book of the Sword (1999), The Book of the Spear (1999), The Book of the Cauldron (1999), and The Book of the Stone (2000) is another Arthurian fantasy. Paxson continued Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Avalon series in Priestess of Avalon (2000) and Ancestors of Avalon (2004); she took over Bradley’s anthology series Sword and Sorceress from volume 21 (2004).

  PEAKE, MERVYN (1911–1968). British writer and artist. The trilogy comprising Titus Groan (1946), Gormenghast (1950), and Titus Alone (1959; rev. 1970) is an archetypal example of modern Gothic grotesquerie (refer to HDHL). The associated novella Boy in Darkness (1976) is a formal allegory with elements of animal fantasy. Mr Pye (1953) is a lighthearted religious fantasy in which the hero is afflicted with angelic and diabolical stigmata as his moral condition changes. A few more fantasies, including poetry and items designed for children, are reprinted in Peake’s Progress: Selected Writings and Drawings (1978; rev. 1981), edited by his widow, Maeve Gilmore.