The A to Z of Fantasy Literature

by Stableford, Brian M.

  (1884–85; reprinted in King Zub, 1897), and with Andrew Lang, he produced the Rider Haggard parody He (1887). His collaborations with the U.S. writer J. Brander Matthews included the comic fantasy

  “Edged Tools” (1886). He wrote The Were-Wolf: A Romantic Play in One Act (1898) with Lilian Moubrey. His solo works include a novella about a family curse, “Lilith” (1874–75), which was reprinted as the first item in The Picture’s Secret: A Story, to Which Is Added an Episode in the Life of Mr Latimer (1883), along with a Faustian fantasy. Both items were reprinted again in A Nine Men’s Morrice: Stories Collected and Recollected (1889), the second being reseparated into two constituent parts. “The Phantasmatograph” (1899) is a hybrid science fantasy about a camera that can record thoughts and fantasies.

  PORTAL FANTASY. A story in which transitions occur between the primary world and a secondary one. The portal may be purely symbolic—like the gates of ivory and horn that serve as fabular en-trances to worlds of visionary fantasy—but material ones evolved as a means of avoiding the necessity for long voyages to lost lands and became vital facilitating devices once the Earth’s surface had run out of terra incognita. Tunnels and mirrors are among the most common portal devices. Portal fantasy was adopted by Farah Mendlesohn as a fundamental category in “Toward a Taxonomy of Fantasy” (2001); its narrative strategy is intermediate between those of intrusive and immersive fantasy, remaining convenient because it allows the reader to view a fantasy world from a more or less familiar viewpoint rather than exercising the much more considerable act of identification required by immersion. A reader’s experience of a secondary world is significantly different if it is presented in a portal fantasy rather than an immersive fantasy.

  Mendlesohn initially defined portal fantasies rather narrowly, excluding portals that “leak,” but wisely relented; such a move sets aside many accounts of Faerie and many contemporary fantasies where boundaries between the mundane and the fantastic are ill defined. Portal fantasies are usually accounts of educative, and sometimes allegorical, quests. Early examples include George MacDonald’s Phantastes,

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  William Morris’s “The Hollow Land,” Mrs. Molesworth’s The Cuckoo Clock (1877), Somerset Maugham’s “The Choice of Amyntas” (1899), and L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. It was imported to pulp fiction by A. Merritt but proved equally useful to such writers as James Branch Cabell, and it was repopularized in children’s fiction by C. S. Lewis, whose use of a wardrobe as a portal to Narnia has become a paradigm example of the device. Norton Juster’s Magic Tollbooth is another cardinal example.

  Unlike intrusive fantasies, which present mysteries to be “unpicked”

  or adversaries to be exorcized, portal fantasies typically present obstacle courses to be “navigated,” sometimes becoming more rather than less mysterious in the process. This pattern is not only typical of fantasies that move into parallel worlds but also of the great majority of timeslip fantasies. The compass of the fundamental story arc is, however, always pointed homeward, whereas characters in an immersive fantasy must find a destiny of their own within their own framework of normality.

  POSTHUMOUS FANTASY. A term used by some critics to describe all stories in which the protagonists experience some kind of life after death, but more narrowly defined in the Clute/Grant Encyclopedia to refer to stories with protagonists who are slow to realize that they are dead and that they have embarked upon a journey into the unknown. Posthumous fantasies are typically set in a version of the primary world, albeit one that may undergo a gradual metamorphosis, while afterlife fantasies are set in some kind of secondary world. A significant precedent was set by Ambrose Bierce’s “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”

  (1891), which employs its protagonist’s belated awareness of his death as a “twist in the tail” ending—a device repeated as frequently as the growth of unfamiliar audiences will allow. The device has been standardized in the notion that ghosts are existentially becalmed, being unable to “move on” to a secondary afterlife until they can tear themselves away from earthly concerns.

  Notable examples of posthumous fantasy include Sutton Vane’s Out-ward Bound (play 1923; novel 1929), Rebecca West’s Harriet Hume (1929), Michael Maurice’s Marooned (1932), Claude Houghton’s Julian Grant Loses His Way (1933), James Gould Cozzens’s Castaway (1934), Charles Williams’s All Hallow’s Eve, G. W. Stonier’s Memoirs of a Ghost (1947), Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman, William Gold-ing’s Pincher Martin (1956), Gene Wolfe’s Peace, Richard Grant’s

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  Tex and Molly in the Afterlife, and Joseph Skibell’s A Blessing on the Moon (1997). There is an interesting subcategory of stories that invite interpretation as posthumous fantasies although no explicit discovery is ever made; it includes Ruthven Todd’s The Lost Traveller (1943) and Michel Bernanos’s The Other Side of the Mountain (1967; tr. 1968). Another interesting subcategory consists of stories with protagonists who remain on Earth as servants of Death, including Selma Lagerlöf’s Thy Soul Shall Bear Witness!, L. Ron Hubbard’s Death’s Deputy, and Gordon Houghton’s Damned If You Do (2000).

  POSTMODERNISM. A term that overspilled literary critical theory in the 1980s, ambitious to embrace every aspect of contemporary culture.

  “Modernism” in this view is with the extent to which the world is

  “knowable” within the limits of our instruments of discovery. Postmodernism transforms such questions by challenging the basic assumption that the world is sufficiently definite and stable to be known whatever instruments might be brought to the task, thus assuming that all cultural artifacts are best understood as constituting an ideologically guided system of convenient delusions.

  The related concept of “postmodernity” suggests that modern culture has entered a distinctive stage in which simulations have lost contact with any allegedly represented reality, referring only to one another—the literary reflection of this being the increasing popularity and incipient dominance of metafiction. Modern fantasy writers, seen from this viewpoint, are all participants in the same linguistic games of pastiche and transfiguration, and some are very conscious of the fact; it is the latter group who are most susceptible to consideration as “postmodern fantasy writers.” They include Paul Auster, John Barth, Andrew Crumey, Steve Erickson, and Steven Millhauser. Other notable examples of conspicuously postmodern fantasy include Matthew Remski’s Silver (1998) and Jack O’Connell’s Word Made Flesh (1999).

  POTTER, BEATRIX (1866–1943). British writer and illustrator who produced a classic series of moralistic/animal fantasies for children, stories that exhibit a distinctive pattern of calculated anthropomorphization. The most notable inclusions are The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1901), The Tailor of Gloucester (1903), The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin (1903), The Tale of Benjamin Bunny (1904), The Tale of Two Bad Mice (1904), The Tale of Mrs Tiggy-Winkle (1905), The Tale of Mr Jeremy Fisher (1906), The Tale of Tom Kitten (1907), The Tale of Jemima

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  Puddle-Duck (1908), The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies (1909), The Tale of Mrs Tittlemouse (1910), The Tale of Mr Tod (1912), and The Tale of Pigling Bland (1913). Similar animal characters provided the person-nel of The Fairy Caravan (1929), a traveling circus joined by a runaway guinea pig. Sister Anne (1932) recycles Bluebeard, and Wag-by-Wall (1944) transfigures a Scottish folktale.

  POWERS, TIM (1952– ). U.S. writer whose early work was mostly sf (refer to HDSFL). The Drawing of the Dark (1979) is a historical fantasy featuring a reincarnate hero who was once King Arthur. The timeslip fantasy The Anubis Gates (1983) broke new ground in pioneering a new kind of hybrid/science fantasy, bringing modernity into collision with the Romantic movement (here represented by Lord Byron and Samuel Taylor Coleridge). The method was echoed in the swashbuckling pirate romance On Stranger Tides (1987) before The Stress of her Regard (1989) returned to the Romantic era, here employing John Keats and Percy Shelley as key characters in a highly
inventive erotic fantasy. Last Call (1992) imported the argument of Jessie Weston’s scholarly fantasy into contemporary Las Vegas; Earthquake Weather (1997) carried its themes forward while simultaneously providing a sequel to the Los Angeles–set theosophist fantasy Expiration Date (1995). Declare (2000) is a spy thriller-cum-conspiracy theory novel in which investigators discover fallen angels at work. Night Moves and Other Stories (2001) includes two collaborations with James Blaylock; one more (with solo stories by both authors) is in The Devils in the Details (2003).

  POWYS, JOHN COWPER (1872–1963). British writer who used his fiction to popularize idiosyncratically dualist metaphysical theories formulated in opposition to his clergyman father’s orthodoxy. An early version is set out in an epic poem initially titled “The Death of God” (written 1906; pub. as Lucifer 1956)—a striking example of literary satanism—while a later one is outlined in some detail in A Glastonbury Romance (1932), whose climax is a hymn to the mother goddess Cy-bele.

  Morwyn; or, The Vengeance of God (1937) is a tirade against vivisec-tion, involving an expedition to a Dantean/underworld where Taliesin guides the protagonist to the place where Merlin sleeps alongside various forgotten deities. Celtic imagery, often syncretized with other mythological materials, crops up repeatedly in other novels of the pe-

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  riod, notably the Arthurian transfiguration Porius (1951) and The Brazen Head (1956), an alchemical fantasy based on a popular legend.

  Atlantis (1954) is a sequel to Homer’s Odyssey; Powys subsequently transfigured the Iliad in the scholarly fantasy Homer and the Aether (1959).

  The reckless animism of Powys’s early surreal fabulation The Owl, the Duck and—Miss Rowe! Miss Rowe! (1930) was recovered in a series of highly exotic novellas with which Powys concluded his career.

  The most lucid is “The Mountains of the Moon,” in which the Moon is inhabited by the astral bodies of earthly dreamers; it was published with Up and Out: A Mystery Tale (1957), an apocalyptic fantasy in which survivors of the world’s explosion—including the monstrous Org and his inamorata Asm—float through the cosmos encountering various

  philosophers, deities, and personified ideas. The Earthbound All or Nothing (1960) develops the author’s fascination with giants. You and Me (1975) revisits the Moon. In Real Wraiths (1976), four ghosts encounter various representatives of the underworld. Two and Two (1976) sends the magician Wat Kums on a cosmic journey mounted on a titan’s back. The final items in the series, collected in Three Fantasies (1985), dissolve into a kind of nonsense the author called “suckfist gibberish.”

  POWYS, THEODORE FRANCIS (1875–1953). British writer. Like his elder brother, John Cowper Powys, he found his father’s theology difficult to reconcile with his experience of the world, but his response was not so extreme. His religious fantasies, which are among the most powerful and adventurous modern Christian fantasies, describe educative visits paid to a group of Dorset villages by various exemplary individuals. Tinker Jar (Yahveh) appears as an avenger in the title novella of The Left Leg (1923), while the mute fisherman of Mockery Gap (1925) discreetly illuminates the lives of a few innocents. The Market Bell, which was written at about the same time but remained unpublished until 1991, is a muted Faustian fantasy in which the eponymous prophetic bell plays the key symbolic role. Mr Weston’s Good Wine (1927) is a more forthright allegory in which a fatherly deity comes to Folly Down as a seller of symbolic wines. Fables (1929, aka No Painted Plumage) consists of surreal dialogues, some of them between humans and natural forces, others featuring nonhuman creatures and inanimate objects; a projected second volume never materialized.

  In “Christ in a Cupboard” (1930), reprinted in The White Paternoster and Other Stories (1930), Jesus visits a virtuous family but is sent away

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  when his charity imperils their wealth; by the time they finally have need of him, he has metamorphosed into the Devil. In “The Key of the Field” (1930), Jar becomes a squire who lets a field to a good man and rescues him from subsequent misfortune by letting him into his beauti-ful garden, while “The Only Penitent” (1931) features a querulous vicar who hears Jar’s confession that he is responsible for “every terror in the earth” but grants him absolution because he is also the author of death; both were reprinted in Bottle’s Path and Other Stories (1946) and the sampler God’s Eyes a-Twinkle (1947). In Unclay (1931), the innocent John Death loses a warrant and must stand idly by while his intended

  “victims” suffer at the hands of a sadistic farmer. In the Faustian title novella of The Two Thieves (1932), a man steals deadly sins in liquid form from the Devil, becoming rich and powerful until Tinker Jar comes to steal them back again. Another Mr. Weston story was belatedly issued as the first item in Two Stories: Come and Dine and Tadnol (1967); posthumously published stories featuring Jar include “The Scapegoat”

  (1978) and “No Wine” (1979).

  PRAED, MRS. CAMPBELL (1851–1935). Australian-born writer, born Rosa Murray-Prior. She went to England when she married in the late 1880s; once there, she developed a keen interest in the fashionable occultism of the day and incorporated its themes into some of her novels.

  Affinities: A Romance of Today (1885), which describes the psychic domination of a young woman by a decadent poet, also features a female occultist modeled on Madame Blavatsky. Blavatsky’s ideas provided the basis for the sensational spiritualist fantasy The Brother of the Shadow: A Mystery of Today (1886), and the personality-displacement stories The Soul of Countess Adrian (1891) and The Insane Root: A Romance of a Strange Country (1902). “As a Watch in the Night”: A Drama of Waking and Dreaming in Five Acts (1901) is a more orthodox theosophical fantasy. Nyria (1904) is an early case study in “past life regression.” The Body of His Desire: A Romance of the Soul (1912) describes the temptation of an Anglican clergyman by a supernatural

  femme fatale. The psychically talented heroine of The Mystery Woman (1913) helps to avert a world war.

  PRANTERA, AMANDA (1942– ). British-born writer long resident in Italy. The Cabalist (1985) is a dark/contemporary fantasy set in Venice. Conversations with Lord Byron on Perversion, 163 Years after his Lordship’s Death (1987) is a computerized spiritualist fantasy. The

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  historical fantasy The Kingdom of Fanes (1995) follows the misfortunes of a princess whose postmarital experiences reflect several popular fairy tales. In Don Giovanna (2000), an amateur production recapitulates and transfigures Mozart’s opera. Spoiler (2003) is a Gothic thriller featuring arcane prophecies of the Antichrist.

  PRATCHETT, TERRY (1948– ). British writer whose humorous fantasies were initially issued by a small press because conventional editorial wisdom at the time considered the subgenre commercially inviable; when the paperback editions became spectacular best sellers, the precedent brought about a sea of change in the marketplace. His first publication, the Faustian fantasy “The Hades Business” (1963), had been written while he was at school. The Carpet People (1971; rev. 1992) is a children’s fantasy set in the microcosm of a carpet. Two sf novels (refer to HDSFL) subsequently helped set the scene and tone for the chimerical Discworld series, in which multitudinous tropes of myth, legend, folklore, and literary fantasy are wryly subverted, either decon-structed by injections of common sense or bizarrely reconstructed by ingenious logical extrapolations. As the series progressed, the comedy became darker and the plotting more robust, many of the later items being neatly crafted thrillers with a mordant humor that serves to intensify rather than alleviate the dramatic tension.

  The main sequence of the Discworld novels comprises The Colour of Magic (1983), The Light Fantastic (1986), Equal Rites (1987), Mort (1987), Sourcery (1988), Wyrd Sisters (1988), Pyramids (1989), Guards! Guards! (1989), Moving Pictures (1990), Reaper Man (1991), Witches Abroad (1991), Small Gods (1992), Lords and Ladies (1992), Men at Arms (1993), Soul Music (1994), Interesting Times (1994), Maskerade (1995
), Feet of Clay (1996), Hogfather (1996), Jingo (1997), The Last Continent (1998), Carpe Jugulum (1998), The Fifth Elephant (1999), The Truth (2000), Thief of Time. (2001), Night Watch (2002), Monstrous Regiment (2003), and Going Postal (2004). Subsidiary to the main sequence are Eric (1990, with Josh Kirby), The Last Hero (2001, with Paul Kidby), The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents (2001), The Wee Free Men (2003), and A Hat Full of Sky (2004), which are more explicitly marketed as children’s fantasies (the whole project has an immense following among teenagers). There are also various spinoff volumes, including graphic novels and screen-play scripts. The main sequence contains four major subseries; one features the hapless wizard Rincewind and his colleagues in the Unseen

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  University, the second a company of witches headed by the re-doubtable Granny Weatherwax, the third the exploits of the Disc-

  world’s personalized Death, and the fourth the city of Ankh-Morpork’s makeshift police force, the Watch. None of these sequences is segmental; all of them make significant progress as the history of the Discworld moves forward and the metaphysical backcloth becomes ever

  more detailed.

  Pratchett’s other works include the hybrid science-fantasy trilogy comprising Truckers (1989), Diggers (1990), and Wings (1990), the apocalyptic fantasy Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch (1990, with Neil Gaiman), and a trilogy of contemporary fantasies for children begun with the sf novel Only You Can Save Mankind (1992), which moved into chimerical territory in Johnny and the Dead (1993) and Johnny and the Bomb (1996).

  PRATT, FLETCHER (1897–1956). U.S. writer who wrote a good deal of sf (refer to HDSFL) and nonfiction before teaming up with L. Sprague de Camp to write humorous fantasies for Unknown. They include the Harold Shea series, featuring a series of parallel worlds playing host to various mythologies and literary fantasies, where the heroes pit their 20th-century wits against the naive magic of the indigenes. The Nordic fantasy “The Roaring Trumpet” and the Spenserian fantasy “The Mathematics of Magic” (both 1940) were reprinted as The Incomplete Enchanter (1941). The Castle of Iron (1941; exp. 1950) features the world of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, whose similarity to Spenser’s causes some confusion. “The Wall of Serpents” (1953), featuring the world of the Kalevala, and the Celtic fantasy “The Green Magician”