1989).
QUILLER-COUCH, SIR ARTHUR (1863–1944). British writer, primarily a poet, who often signed himself “Q.” His father and grandfather were both enthusiastic collectors of the folk tales of Cornwall, which
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provided material for most of his ghost stories and humorous fantasies, which in turn are mingled with other materials in the collections Noughts and Crosses (1891), “I Saw Three Ships” and Other Winter’s Tales (1892), Wandering Ghosts (1895), Old Fires and Profitable Ghosts (1900), The Laird’s Luck (1901), The White Wolf and Other Fire-side Tales (1902), Two Sides of the Face (1903), and Shakespeare’s Christmas (1905). Castle Dor (1962, posthumously completed by Daphne du Maurier) features a magically inspired reenactment of the tale of Tristan and Isolde.
QUINN, SEABURY (1889–1969). U.S. writer. He was a prolific contributor to Weird Tales, which featured his extensive series of occult/
detective stories featuring Jules de Grandin, most of which are also horror stories (refer to HDHL). More central to the fantasy genre are his sentimental Christmas fantasy Roads (1938; rev. book 1948) and Alien Flesh (1977), an erotic fantasy featuring an identity exchange.
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RABELAIS, FRANÇOIS (1494–1553). French scholar whose groundbreaking series of satirical fantasies featuring the giant Gargantua, his son Pantagruel, and the latter’s companion Panurge, first published between 1532 and 1564, was gathered together into an omnibus usually known in translation as Gargantua and Pantagruel. The characters’ absurd adventures provide scathing commentaries on contemporary society as well as a great deal of grotesquerie for its own sake; influenced by Lucian, they had an equal influence on Jonathan Swift and Voltaire, becoming crucial to the entire traditions of satirical fantasy and the conte philosophique, as well as the tradition of erotic fantasy.
The adjective “Rabelaisian” is routinely applied to exuberantly reckless bawdiness.
Panurge has affinities with such ingenious servants as Arlequino in the commedia dell’arte, although his voyage of discovery in search of advice as to whether or not to marry is a spectacular parody of Romantic quests. Suspicions of atheism, which led to the author’s persecution and thus to the increasing pessimism of the later texts, were unjustified, although the key motif of the defiantly irreligious monastery of Thélème (Thelema) became a powerful symbol of resistance to moral tyranny, its motto “do as thou wilt” gladly adopted by Aleister Crowley. Rabelais’s
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influence echoes resonantly in the works of such writers as Pierre Louÿs and Marcel Aymé; Francis Watson’s Trinc! (1932) is a modern extension of the series.
RADFORD, IRENE (1950– ). U.S. writer. The Dragon Nimbus series, comprising The Glass Dragon (1994), The Perfect Princess (1995), The Loneliest Magician (1996), and The Wizard’s Treasure (2000), is an account of corrosive thinning. The prequel trilogy The Dragon’s Touch-stone (1997), The Last Battlemage (1997), and The Renegade Dragon (1999) finds the dragons nearer to their heyday. The Merlin’s Descendants series, comprising Guardian of the Balance (1999), Guardian of the Trust (2000), Guardian of the Vision (2001), and Guardian of the Promise (2003), is an interesting extrapolation of Arthurian fantasy, which ultimately reaches the Elizabethan era.
RANKIN, ROBERT (1949– ). British humorist who imports all manner of chimerical fantastic materials into mundane settings in order to generate bizarre situations and hectic action. The tone of his works was set by the trilogy comprising The Antipope (1981), The Brentford Triangle (1982), and East of Ealing (1984) but became much more extravagant when the series was extended by The Sprouts of Wrath (1988). Nostradamus Ate My Hamster (1996), The Brentford Chainstore Massacre (1997), Sprout Mask Replica (1997), Sex and Drugs and Sausage Rolls (1999), and Web Site Story (2001) share the same setting. The trilogy comprising Armageddon: The Musical (1990), They Came and Ate Us (1991), and The Suburban Book of the Dead (1992) juxtaposes a time-tripping Elvis Presley with B-movie sf motifs.
The trilogy comprising The Book of Ultimate Truths (1993), Raiders of the Lost Car Park (1994), and The Greatest Show off Earth (1994) draws inspiration from such sources as Fortean Times and the Weekly World News, as does The Most Amazing Man Who Ever Lived (1995).
The Garden of Unearthly Delights (1995), in which Earth enters a zone of noncausality where magic works and technology doesn’t, is closer to the core of genre fantasy. A Dog Called Demolition (1996) is the story of the world’s first “surreal killer.” The Dance of the Voodoo Handbag (1998) introduced private eye Laszlo Woodbine, also featured in Waiting for Godalming (2000) and The Fandom of the Operator (2001). In The Hollow Chocolate Bunnies of the Apocalypse (2002), nursery rhyme characters are murdered in Toy City. The Witches of Chiswick (2003) are more down to earth than their equivalents in Eastwick.
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RANSOME, ARTHUR (1884–1967). British writer best known for the best-selling children’s fiction he wrote in the 1930s and 1940s, which totally eclipsed his earlier career as a decadent fantasist. A few fairy tales not aimed at children are included in the collection The Stone Lady (1905); the sentimental fantasies in The Hoofmarks of the Faun (1911) are even more mature. The Elixir of Life (1915) is a dark fantasy.
RASPE, RUDOLF ERIC (1737–1794). German scholar and swindler who translated James Macpherson’s fake Celtic epics before producing an account of Baron Münchhausen’s Narrative of His Marvellous Travels and Campaigns in Russia (1785), which became a paradigm example of tall story–telling and caused considerable embarrassment to the actual baron. Later English editions took aboard extensions of the narrative by several other hands, far wordier than the laconic originals.
Raspe also used Münchhausen as the narrator of his Gothic fantasy Koenigsmark the Robber; or, The Terror of Bohemia (1790; tr. 1801).
RATIONALIZED FANTASY. The Clute/Grant Encyclopedia uses this term in three ways. The first refers to works in which magic is strictly rule bound, usually by Frazerian laws, and is similar to the same book’s definition of hard fantasy. The second refers to the much larger category of stories that appear to be fantasy until a de-supernaturalizing explanation is provided in the climax—a formula that almost acquired generic status in the “weird menace” pulps. The third refers to hybrid science fantasies in which familiar fantasy motifs are provided with pseudoscientific explanations. A fourth meaning often encountered in reviews and commentaries is equivalent to the description of “de-supernaturalized fantasy” used in these pages; it refers to historical fictions that focus intently on the substance of myth and legend, employing viewpoint characters who take belief in magic and the supernatural for granted but refrain from featuring any occurrences that a rationalist reader would construe as magical or supernatural. Arthurian and classical fantasy both have substantial fringes of this kind.
RAWN, MELANIE (1953– ). U.S. writer. Her early works deployed dragons similar to those deployed in Anne McCaffrey’s planetary romances. In her first trilogy, comprising Dragon Prince (1988), The Star Scroll (1989), and Sunrunner’s Fire (1990), dragons are initially regarded as pests—and hence as the legitimate targets of murderous
knight-errantry—but its hero’s discovery that dragon eggs can be alchemically converted into gold brings about a new relationship between
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the species. The story continued in the Dragon Star trilogy, comprising Stronghold (1990), The Dragon Token (1991), and Skybowl (1993). The Exiles series, comprising The Ruins of Ambrai (1994), The Mageborn Traitor (1997), and The Captal’s Tower (2004), is a tale of persecution set in a world of reversed sex roles. The Golden Key, a collaborative project with Jennifer Roberson and Kate Elliott, is set in an alternative medieval Spain, featuring magically talented members of an artists’
guild.
REALMS OF FANTASY. Bimonthly U.S. magazine launched in 1994, under the editorship of Shawna MacCarthy, as a companion to Science Fiction Age. It survived the latter magazine’s
demise to establish itself as the chief U.S. market for short fantasies of all kinds. Its Folkroots department examines the sources of modern fantasy, while its Gallery section showcases fantasy illustration.
RECURSIVE FANTASY. The Clute/Grant Encyclopedia gives two definitions of “recursive fantasy,” the first referring to fantasies in which protagonists enter secondary worlds based on previously existing fictions, the second to metafictions that depict “tangled reality levels”
without reference to actual preexistent works. Both kinds of fantasy are discussed here as subsets of metafiction.
RECYCLING. One of the key features of literary fantasies based on myths, legends, and folk tales is that they continue the process of serial transmission that presumably carried the stories across the centuries before they were first written down; they are regarded as “common property” available for retelling and reshaping. No clear boundary can be drawn between “straightforward” retellings, which carefully conserve the main features of the story, and more adventurous ones that incorporate elements of reinterpretation, make inquiries into puzzles of motivation and logic, introduce new materials, and draw out new morals. This spectrum extends into radical transfigurations, which place the stories in different cultural contexts, reverse roles, offer satirical subversions, and so on. The license to recycle traditional materials in which no one has any definable intellectual property rights is often tacitly assumed to apply to all literary products that resemble myths, legends, or folktales; this is part of the process by which influential works join the population of taproot texts.
Notable recyclers of traditional material—usually but not invariably writing for children—include Howard Pyle, Padraic Colum, Kevin
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Crossley-Holland, Randy Lee Eickhoff, Morgan Llewelyn, Michael Scott, and Geraldine McCaughrean.
REDGROVE, PETER (1932–2003). British writer, best known as a poet.
His first novels, written in collaboration with his wife, Penelope Shut-tle— The Terrors of Dr Treviles (1974) and The Glass Cottage (1976)—
are complex fabulations employing metaphysical contexts reminiscent of those framing works by John Cowper Powys. His solo novels are ambiguous/science fantasies (refer to HDSFL) with occult and erotic elements. The One Who Set Out to Study Fear (1989) recycles tales from the Brothers Grimm in a surreal manner.
REED, JEREMY (1951– ). British writer in the surrealist tradition. After the marginal occult fantasy Black Rock (1987), his prose works began to pay explicit homage to the French literary tradition, by using its heroes as characters—Charles Baudelaire (as viewed by his mistress) in Red Eclipse (1989), Isidore Ducasse in Isidore: A Novel about the Comte de Lautréamont (1991), and the timeslipping “divine Marquis”
in When the Whip Comes Down: A Novel about de Sade (1992). Chasing Black Rainbows: A Novel about Antonin Artaud (1994) and Diamond Nebula (1994) deemphasize fantasy elements as they move into the present and future. Dorian (1997) is a sequel to Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. Boy Caesar (2004) is an account of reincarnation.
RE-ENCHANTMENT. However the term is construed, the permanent loss or neglect of enchantment is generally considered to be a bad thing. A single-minded and narrowly focused concentration on brute reality may sometimes be necessary, even over extended periods, but few people—at least among literary folk—would recommend it as a way of life. A good deal of fantasy literature takes a polemical view of the necessity of re-enchantment after any such period of disenchanting concentration, routinely proposing a determined reinvestment in some kind of magic, often symbolized by Faerie.
The arguments for re-enchantment deployed in the 19th century, by
such writers as Charles Dickens and Lewis Carroll, protested against campaigns to make factual and moral education the principal focus of children’s literature. In the aftermath of World War I, a considerable number of unusually heartfelt pleas of this kind were produced in
Britain; notable examples include Stella Benson’s Living Alone, Gerald Bullett’s Mr Godly beside Himself, Hope Mirrlees’s Lud-in-the-Mist,
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Lord Dunsany’s The King of Elfland’s Daughter, and Margaret Irwin’s These Mortals. The phenomenon was less obvious in the United States, which had been less affected by the privations of the war, but something similar can be observed in the postwar works of James Branch Cabell and Thorne Smith.
World War II does not seem to have had a similarly widespread ef-
fect—although The Lord of the Rings was completed in its aftermath—
perhaps because the science-fictional myth of the Space Age took off so spectacularly in that period. There is, however, nothing halfhearted about the pleas for re-enchantment embodied in such modern examples as Paul Gallico’s The Man Who Was Magic (1967), Michaela Roessner’s Walkabout Woman, Midori Snyder’s Oran trilogy, and Monica Hughes’s The Story Box.
REES, CELIA (1949– ). British writer who diversified from thrillers into teenage horror fiction—including Blood Sinister (1996), the Templar fantasy Ghost Chamber (1997), and The Soul Taker (1997)—before producing the more relaxed H.A.U.N.T.S. series, comprising H Is for Haunting (1998), A Is for Apparition (1998), U Is for Unbeliever (1998), N Is for Nightmare (1998), T Is for Terror (1999), and S Is for Shudder (1998)—repackaged in three volumes as City of Shadows, A Trap in Time, and The Host Rides Out and in the omnibus A Trap in Time—
which features a boy with second sight. Rees then ventured into historical fantasy in The Cunning Man (2000) and a series launched with Witch Child (2001) and Sorceress (2002), in which an English girl is dispatched to the American colonies when she shows signs of being a
witch.
REICHERT, MICKEY ZUCKER (1962– ). U.S. writer. The series
launched by Godslayer (1987) drafts an American soldier into a war rooted in Nordic fantasy; his story was continued in Shadow Climber (1988), Dragonrank Master (1989), Shadow’s Realm (1990), and By Chaos Cursed (1991) before the trilogy comprising The Last of the Ren-shai (1992), The Western Wizard (1992), and Child of Thunder (1993) moved the whole milieu on to a larger stage, further employed in the trilogy comprising Beyond Ragnarok (1995), Prince of Demons (1996), and The Children of Wrath (1998). The Legend of Nightfall (1993) features a powerful mage trapped in an assistant role. Spirit Fox (1998, with Jennifer Wingert) features a young woman invested with an animal spirit. Flightless Falcon (2000) is a picaresque fantasy. The Beasts of
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Barakhai (2001) and The Lost Dragons of Barakhai (2002) are theriomorphic/portal fantasies.
REINCARNATION. The notion that some undying essence within a living being is serially reincarnated is common to several mythologies, some of which also assert that the sequence might move “upward” toward some kind of perfection or “downward” toward degradation, ac-
cording to the moral quality of each individual incarnation; the latter notion is the central assumption of the subgenre of karmic romance. The idea of reincarnation is also a staple of spiritualist and theosophical fantasy. The most popular sources of reincarnated souls, in lifestyle fantasy as well as fantasy literature, are Atlantis and ancient Egypt, the latter owing its prominence to the iconic significance of mummies.
Apart from karmic romances, the most common use of serial human
reincarnation in fantasy is to facilitate large-scale historical surveys, like the one carried out in Jack London’s The Star Rover, but the notion may also be used to construct intense psychological fantasies like Paul Busson’s The Man Who Was Born Again (1921) and Frank de Felitta’s Audrey Rose (1976). Stories featuring the reincarnation of humans as animals tend to take a much broader view of karmic penalty, if they invoke it at all; notable examples include W. H. Hudson’s “Marta Riquelme”
(1902), Robert Hichens’s “The Black Spaniel” (1905), L. P. Jacks’s “The Professor’s Mare,” Ben Hecht’s “The Adventures of Professor Emmett,”
; and James Herbert’s Fluke (1977). Reincarnation on other worlds than Earth was a particular fascination of the 19th-century French spiritualist and sf writer Camille Flammarion, whose popularization of the notion prompted such variants as Mortimer Collins’s Transmigration (1874).
Contes philosophiques considering various aspects of the notion include Rudyard Kipling’s “The Finest Story in the World” (1893), M. P. Shiel’s “Tulsah,” and Sydney Fowler Wright’s “The Choice”
(1929). Notable recent examples include Laura Esquivel’s The Law of Love (1995 in French; English tr. 1997), David Ambrose’s A Memory of Demons (2003) and Jeremy Reed’s Boy Caesar (2004).
REISS, KATHRYN (1957– ). U.S. writer for young adults. In Time Windows (1991), a dollhouse offers a window to the past. Dreadful Sorry (1993) and Rest in Peace (1997) are ghost stories, the second involving dreams. Pale Phoenix (1994), PaperQuake (1998), and Paint by Magic (2002) are timeslip fantasies. The series comprising Dollhouse of the
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Dead (1997), The Headless Bride (1997), and Sweet Miss Honeywell’s Revenge (2004) feature a haunted dollhouse.
RELIGIOUS FANTASY. Religious fantasy is an awkward category, because religions embody items of belief that seem obviously fantastic to nonbelievers but are accepted as matters of faith by adherents. Thus, fiction featuring active interventions in human affairs by Jesus or guardian angels is routinely produced by Christians as inspirational literature, intended to be consumed as a more accurate record of the real world than any mundanely naturalistic fiction. On the other hand, there is a good deal of lore contained within any religious system that is usually seen as allegorical, metaphorical, or straightforwardly fanciful; an insistence on the absolute literal truth of every word of Scripture is often seen as bizarre and rationally unsustainable even within the ranks of the devout.
The A to Z of Fantasy Literature Page 54
