The A to Z of Fantasy Literature

by Stableford, Brian M.

  Whatever their followers may claim, and however sincere their practitioners might be, all treatises on alchemy, astrology, reincarnation, spiritualism, theosophy, and ritual magic are scholarly fantasies. In terms of the history of fantasy literature, however, such texts are of less significance than historical studies that produce fanciful hypotheses to

  “explain” the history of magical beliefs and the persecution of witches in unduly credulous terms, whether (like Éliphas Lévi) they accept the workability of magic or merely (like James Frazer and Margaret Murray) offer recklessly fabricated accounts of the magical beliefs supposedly held by their subjects.

  Scholarly fantasies are bound to emerge from the human sciences in some profusion, because the understanding at which those sciences aim involves trying to see things as other social actors see (or, in history, saw) them. Such acts of imaginative identification are intrinsically difficult to test, and such evidence as the past leaves behind usually fits several different accounts of what the relevant actors might have

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  thought they were doing. When interpretations of the past have to come to terms with the fantasies entertained by the people of the past, attempts to sort out what was actually believed, to what extent, and on what grounds become extremely difficult; such attempts risk infection not only by the fantasies of the objects of study but by fantasies born of earlier attempts to understand them. In consequence, scholarly fantasies once thought extinct or obsolete sometimes make spectacular comebacks, often in transfigured forms. This is one reason why belief in magic and divination seems to be more widespread now than ever

  before—and why both accidental and calculated scholarly fantasies are more widespread now than they have ever been before.

  Fantasy literature inevitably makes avid use of scholarly fantasies whenever such borrowing is convenient or aesthetically appealing; even the most candid fabulation requires the cultivation of narrative plausibility. Thus, Celtic fantasy draws extensively on the fantasies of Lewis Spence, Arthurian and grail quest fantasy on the fantasies of Jessie Weston, and goddess fantasy on the post-Frazerian fantasies of Robert Graves. Taproot texts are not merely treasure houses ripe for plunder but sources of authority, and antiquity lends such authority even to the wildest allegations that fabricated antiquity is a valuable asset. Obvious and frankly preposterous inventions can not only be excused by the pretence that they are ancient but invested with a precious glamor. Literary poseurs are, however, less prone to the danger of falling prey to their own rhetoric than are scholarly fantasists; many scholarly fantasists—

  like most lifestyle fantasists—appear to be failed literateurs, for whom nonfictional representation of their ideas was a fall-back position.

  SCHWEITZER, DARRELL (1952– ). U.S. editor and writer, very active in the small press field. He has been associated with various revivals of

  Weird Tales since 1977; his own work is solidly set in Lovecraftian tradition, although his scholarly interests extend farther back to such writers as Lord Dunsany. The story series collected in We Are All Legends (1981) is an elegiac heroic fantasy. The White Isle (1975; exp.

  book 1989) is an Orphean fantasy. The Shattered Goddess (1982) is a far-futuristic fantasy. The Mask of the Sorcerer (1991; exp. book 1995) is set in a prehistoric milieu. Short stories employing equally various settings are mingled with other materials in Tom O’Bedlam’s Night Out and Other Strange Excursions (1985), Refugees from an Imaginary Country (1999), and The Great World and the Small: More

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  Tales of the Ominous and Magical (2001). Transients and Other Dis-quieting Stories (1993) is more inclined toward horror.

  SCHWOB, MARCEL (1867–1905). French writer. He was one of the most versatile contributors to the French Decadent movement; his friendship with Oscar Wilde—he helped Pierre Louÿs to polish the final draft of Salomé—assisted the movement’s exportation to Britain.

  His works include two collections of tales inspired by Charles Baudelaire’s translations of Edgar Allan Poe, translations from which are sampled in The King in the Golden Mask and Other Stories (1982).

  SCIENCE FANTASY. A term used in several different ways, most frequently to refer to a hybrid tradition of pulp fiction extending from the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs and A. Merritt, which borrowed notions from the vocabulary of sf (refer to HDSFL) to add plausibility to exotic exercises in uninhibited escapism. Although the primary form of such fiction is the planetary romance, the jargon of parallel worlds gave a significant boost to hybrid portal fantasies, and the use of far-futuristic fantasy by Clark Ashton Smith opened up another useful arena. While sf retained its dominant position in the paperback marketplace, there was considerable pressure on writers of immersive fantasy to use tokenistic science-fictional frames. That pressure evapo-rated after 1980. Many writers continued to employ various kinds of hybridization for purely aesthetic reasons, but a more enduring legacy was the kind of chimerical science fantasy pioneered by Unknown, which enjoyed a considerable resurgence once genre fantasy was

  firmly established in its commercial niche. The chimerical combinations favored by writers who dabbled in fabulation further enhanced the modern dominance of chimerical science fantasy over hybrid

  forms.

  SCIENCE FICTION. A kind of fantasy that mimics the method of science in extrapolating rationally plausible consequences from empirically licensed premises. This method is particularly useful for the generation of hypothetical technologies and for constructing plausible images of the near future; consequently, almost all fantasies featuring imaginary machines or set in the future are generally reckoned to be sf, even if their claims to rational plausibility are derisory. Although a good deal of sf is intrusive, featuring newly developed hypothetical technologies or alien invasions, and while many sf stories employ portals of various kinds to transport their protagonists into the future or alien

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  worlds, it was sf writers who were forced by the nature of their concerns to develop the narrative techniques appropriate to immersive fantasy.

  Because it was the pulp sf magazines that trained their audience in the esoteric skills required in reading immersive fantasy, pulp experiments in other kinds of immersive fantasy—most notably sword and sorcery fiction—shared a substantial fraction of the same audience, and the relevant subgenres remained closely associated until the assumption of economic hegemony by paperback books facilitated their fission. This close association encouraged the growth and development of various kinds of science fantasy, and it also ensured that when commodified fantasy emerged in the 1970s it would be displayed in the same display space as sf in bookshops. The competition for shelf space thus instituted was always certain to be won by commodified fantasy, partly because its raw materials are more universally accessible but mainly because it is amenable to the tight formularizarion required to secure predictabil-ity of effect, while sf is not.

  Writers of “hard sf” who dabble in pure fantasy—notably Robert A.

  Heinlein, Poul Anderson, Greg Bear, in Songs of Earth and Power (1994), and Lois McMaster Bujold, in The Curse of Chalion (2001) and Paladin of Souls (2003)—inevitably bring a sensibility to the task quite distinct from that of writers of science fantasy whose work sheds its hybrid elements, like Andre Norton, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Julian May—in the Boreal Moon series (launched 2003)—and Sean McMullen, in the Moonworlds saga (launched 2003). Several recent debutants in the field of commodified fantasy have been sf writers pseudonymously repackaging themselves; notable examples include “David Farland” (Dave Wolverton), author of the Runelords series

  (1998–2003); “Valery Leith” (Tricia Sullivan), author of the Everien trilogy, comprising The Company of Glass (1999), The Riddled Night (2000), and The Way of the Rose (2001); and “S. L. Farrell” (Stephen Leigh), author of the Cloudmages series (launched 2003).

  SCOTT, MICHAEL (1943– ). Irish writer. His early works re
cycled/

  Celtic legends and folk tales in The Song of the Children of Lir (1983) and Irish Folk and Fairy Tales (3 vols., 1984). The trilogy comprising A Bright Enchantment, A Golden Dream, and A Silver Wish (all 1985), the couplet comprising The Last of the Fianna (1987) and The Quest of the Sons (1988), and Navigator: The Voyage of Saint Brendan (1988, with Gloria Gaghan) are less straightforward in their recycling. The bardic fantasy trilogy comprising Magician’s Law (1987), Demon’s Law

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  (1988), and Death’s Law (1989) embeds similar materials in an elegiac historical fantasy of thinning. The De Danann Tales comprise Wind-lord (1991) and Earthlord (1991). Scott’s subsequent work maintained its melodramatic pitch by transplanting similar raw materials into horror fiction; fantasy elements are most conspicuous in Banshee (1990) and Reflection (1992). He collaborated with Morgan Llywelyn on the Arcana series and various other projects.

  SCOTT, SIR WALTER (1771–1832). Scottish writer. He compiled an important anthology of ballads, Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802), and his own Romantic poetry makes copious use of Scottish legends and fairy lore. “The Lay of the Last Minstrel” (1805) helped define an image of the wizard—as a learned practitioner of various medieval arts, including astrology and alchemy—that echoes resonantly in modern fantasy literature. The publishing company Scott founded

  played a major role in popularizing similar materials in verse and prose.

  A few of his historical novels draw on Scottish legendry without becoming wholeheartedly fantastic, most notably The Bride of Lammer-moor (1819) and The Monastery (1820). Redgauntlet (1824) includes the often-reprinted “Wandering Willie’s Tale,” about a dangerous excursion to the world of the dead (refer to HDHL).

  SECONDARY WORLD. A term coined by J. R. R. Tolkien in “On Fairy-stories” (1947) to describe the kind of location in which fairy tales generally take place, the imaginative entry into which by the reader involves the process of enchantment. It proved such a useful term that its range of reference was broadened to take in other kinds of fantastic locations—especially the spaces that lie on the other side of portals—as it became one of the basic terms of critical discourse in relation to fantasy literature. The means by which secondary worlds can be linked to the primary world are many and various; although there are only three fundamental dimensions of potential displacement—

  backward in time, forward in time, and “sideways” into a lost or parallel world—their use is complicated by more elaborate narrative strategies. With the exception of far-futuristic fantasies, futuristic scenarios are usually surrendered to sf, but the past and parallel worlds are each stocked with several subspecies of imaginary locations.

  The idea that lands once existed that have vanished from the Earth’s surface, usually by inundation, is central to Atlantean fantasy and its analogues. The hypothetical continent of Lemuria, invented by zoolo-

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  gists attempting to understand similarities between the ecosystems of Madagascar and India when continental drift was still regarded as a scholarly fantasy, was integrated into theosophical fantasy, along with the sub-Arctic realm of Hyperborea popularized by Pliny the Elder, and spread therefrom into other subgenres, notably sword and sorcery fiction. Some later scholarly fantasists moved Lemuria from the Indian Ocean to the Pacific, a new variant being popularized in The Lost Continent of Mu (1926) by James Churchward. Other lost continents of scholarly fantasy include John Newbrough’s Pan and Lewis Spence’s Antillia, but these are of negligible relevance to fantasy fiction; the drowned land of Lyonesse or Ys is more commonly encountered.

  Other lands reported in traveler’s tales that remained plausible secondary-world settings until the early 20th century include the biblical Ophir, the South American lands of Eldorado and Cibola (the “seven cities” from which the Aztecs allegedly sprung), and the kingdom of Prester John—although what literary travelers usually find in such places is not so much the worldly wealth they seek as a reconnection with a quasi-Arcadian way of life. No clear boundary separates mundane geographical fancies from overtly supernatural locations like the Isles of the Blessed, the Arthurian Avalon, Cokaygne, St. Brendan’s Isle, and the Celtic Tir-nan-Og, which are often syncretically combined by writers interested in their strategic modification. Historical inventions such as James Branch Cabell’s Poictesme or Clark Ashton Smith’s Averoigne are only slightly easier to sustain than contemporary ones like Anthony Hope’s Ruritania and T. F. Powys’s Folly Down.

  “Sideways” movements long preceded the sophistication of the idea of displacement in a fourth (or fifth) dimension, although the precise topo-graphical relationship between the everyday world and such parallels as Faerie and various underworlds was never easy to define. The dreams of visionary and hallucinatory fantasy were the principal means of access to imaginary locations in the 19th century, thus linking those subgenres to the evolution of portal fantasy. Visionary access continued in use throughout the 20th century, in spite of the increased plausibility of dimensional portals, because it provided a ready means of “personaliz-ing” imaginary locations to fit their content to the problems and ambitions of individual protagonists. Another convenient strategy of sideways movement is miniaturization, which allows imaginary locations to be packed away in the interstices of the primary world. Science fantasies routinely use extraterrestrial Earth-clones, thus establishing the subgenre

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  of planetary romances. The rapid proliferation of computer games has greatly encouraged the location of secondary worlds in cyberspace.

  The secondary worlds of immersive fantasy often refuse to specify any definite temporal or spatial relationship to the primary world, although their replication of the physical conditions of Earth’s surface tacitly implies that they can be considered as alternatives within a generous multiverse. Worlds within texts may, however, be credited with an entirely independent existence, any resemblances to our own being merely fortuitous.

  SECRET HISTORY. A pattern of events imagined to be taking place “behind the scenes” of recorded history without disturbing it. Historical fiction makes much of such unrecorded events, and supernaturalized versions form the core of historical fantasy. Texts that allege that the recorded version of events is deeply mistaken or calculatedly deceptive edge into alternative history.

  Secret histories involving workable magic, the actual existence of vampires, or the reality of Faerie are assisted in their plausibility by the assumption that some kind of thinning process has removed such supernatural apparatus from the modern world. Many secret histories, however, propose that supernatural devices have been deliberately concealed rather than thinned out, reserved for the esoteric use of secret societies. The latter notion is fundamental to much occult fantasy, especially Rosicrucian fantasy.

  The notion that secret societies and conspiracies have played a major role in determining social progress while carefully removing all trace of themselves from the historical record is fundamental to a subgenre of thriller fiction pioneered by Paul Féval, which has recently enjoyed a spectacular revitalization in such best sellers as Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum and Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code (2003). The Templars usually play a leading role in the secret histories mapped out in contemporary thrillers, but not in those constructed by such elaborate historical fantasies as Mary Gentle’s Ash: A Secret History.

  SEDGWICK, MARCUS (1968– ). British writer. The Dark Horse (2001) is a prehistoric fantasy with Nordic elements. Witch Hill (2001) features disturbing dreams of a witch. The Book of Dead Days (2003) is an unconventional Faustian fantasy involving an underworld.

  SELF, WILL (1961– ). British writer of literary fiction whose work is often flamboyantly grotesque. Cock and Bull (1992) is a graphic erotic

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  fantasy. My Idea of Fun (1993) has an element of Faustian fantasy.

  Great Apes (1997) is a satirical/animal fantasy. How t
he Dead Live (2000) has an element of afterlife fantasy. Dorian (2002) transfigures Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray. The short stories in The Quantity Theory of Insanity (1991), Grey Area and Other Stories (1994), Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys (1998), and Dr Mukti and Other Tales of Woe (2004) include numerous fabulations.

  SENDAK, MAURICE (1928– ). U.S. illustrator who began writing texts for young children to accompany his more imaginative flights of fancy in Kenny’s Window (1956). Very Far Away (1957) champions escapism as a existential necessity of childhood—a theme assertively carried forward by the classic Where the Wild Things Are (1963) and In the Night Kitchen (1970). Outside Over There (1981) is darker, recycling an Orphean fantasy preserved by the Brothers Grimm.

  SENTIMENTAL FANTASY. Fantasy that supernaturalizes the affectionate emotions; the category includes a great many erotic fantasies in which the primary emphasis is on love rather than lust, but sentimental fantasies can also celebrate bonds between parents and children, siblings, humans and animals, and childhood friends. Sentimental fantasy is frequently heartrending and usually expresses a strong belief in the redemptive power of love, but it also includes relatively detached studies of the nature and power of bonds of intimacy. Notable examples of various types include Théophile Gautier’s Spirite, George du Maurier’s Peter Ibbetson, Rudyard Kipling’s They, F. W. Bourdillon’s Nephelé (1896), Barry Pain’s Going Home, Daphne du Maurier’s The Loving Spirit (1931), Edith Pargeter’s The City Lies Four-Square (1939), Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince (1944), numerous works by Robert Nathan, Peter S. Beagle’s A Fine and Private Place, Richard Matheson’s Bid Time Return, Alan Brennert’s Kindred Spirits (1984), Nancy Willard’s Things Invisible to See, and Lisa Carey’s The Mermaids Singing (2001). Paranormal romance is a commodified form of sentimental fantasy; other subgenres conspicuously hospitable to it include angelic fantasy and timeslip fantasy.