The A to Z of Fantasy Literature
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SILVERBERG, ROBERT (1935– ). U.S. writer best known for sf (refer to HDSFL). Son of Man (1987) is an allegorical/far-futuristic fantasy.
The Book of Skulls (1972) describes a costly quest for magical immortality. The series comprising Lord Valentine’s Castle (1980), The Desert of Stolen Dreams (1981), The Majipoor Chronicles (1982), Valentine Pontifex (1983), The Mountains of Majipoor (1995), Sorcerers of Majipoor (1997), Lord Prestimion (1999), and The King of Dreams (2001) is planetary romance of a calculatedly exotic kind. Gilgamesh the King (1984) recycled the Sumerian epic before Silverberg extended it in
“Gilgamesh in the Outback” (1986), which was combined with two further stories in the transfigurative To the Land of the Living (1989). Letters from Atlantis (1990) is an Atlantean fantasy. Lion Time in Tim-buctoo (1990) is a historical fantasy. Legends (1998) and Legends II (2003) are showcase anthologies of novellas linked to best-selling series.
SINCLAIR, UPTON (1876–1968). U.S. writer. Prince Hagen: A Phan-tasy (1903; play version 1909) is a political satire in which the central figure is borrowed from Nordic mythology. Roman Holiday (1931) is a politically loaded timeslip fantasy. The Gnome-Mobile (1936) is a children’s fantasy incorporating an early environmentalist protest. The delusional fantasy They Call Me Carpenter (1922) and the timeslip fantasy Our Lady (1938) are earnest Christian fantasies with a pessimistic trend that is continued in the messianic fantasy What Didymus Did (1954, aka It Happened to Didymus).
SINGER, ISAAC BASHEVIS (1904–1991). Polish writer who wrote in Hebrew before embracing the Yiddish vernacular; he moved to the
United States in 1935, where translations of his work sometimes preceded the originals into print. His work draws heavily on the folkloristic
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roots of Jewish fantasy—whose leading modern recycler and developer he became—but routinely combines such material with depictions of the Devil and witches that are more in keeping with the spirit of Christian fantasy. The novels Satan in Goray (1935; tr. 1955) and The Penitent (1983) both feature false messiahs, while The Magician of Lublin (tr.
1960) and The Fools of Chem and Their History (tr. 1973) are also historical fantasies. His short stories are collected in Gimpel the Fool and Other Stories (1957), The Spinoza of Market Street (1961), Short Friday and Other Stories (1964), The Seance and Other Stories (1968), A Friend of Kafka (1970), A Crown of Feathers and Other Stories (1973), Passions and Other Stories (1975), Old Love (1979), The Image and Other Stories (1985), Gifts (1985), and The Death of Methuselah and Other Stories (1988). His children’s fantasies include Zlateh the Goat and Other Stories (1966), When Schlemiel Went to Warsaw and Other Stories (1968), The Topsy-Turvy Emperor of China (1971), The Power of Light (1980), The Golem (1982), and Meshugah (1994).
SITWELL, OSBERT (1892–1969). British writer, one of three sibling poets. The title novella of Triple Fugue and Other Stories (1924) is a satire featuring technologically merged souls. The Man Who Lost Himself (1929) is a timeslip fantasy. Miracle on Sinai (1929) describes the effect of a new Mosaic revelation on a cross-sectional band of tourists.
Collected Stories (1953) reprints “The Glow-Worm,” in which a journalist’s spiritual condition is ironically reflected in the waxing and wan-ing of his halo, and the ghost story A Place of One’s Own (1941). Fee Fi Fo Fum! (1959) is a collection of cynically transfigured fairy tales; its long version of Cinderella is a political satire.
SMALL PRESS. A publishing company established for vocational rather than commercial motives. Small presses played a vital role in the evolution and presentation of fantasy throughout the 19th century, from Walter Scott’s imprint to William Morris’s Kelmscott Press. Small press magazines like The Germ and The Savoy were significant in providing arenas for literary experimentation, and private publishers like the Golden Cockerel Press and the Hogarth Press were usually hospitable to offbeat fantasy. The fan culture associated with the sf pulps took considerable inspiration from the Amateur Publishing Association, with which H. P. Lovecraft was involved and through which he met some of his correspondents. Lovecraftian fiction has always been associated with enthusiastic small-press activity since August Derleth and
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Donald Wandrei established Arkham House; the most significant im-
prints include Roy A. Squires, Jack Chalker’s Mirage Press, Marc Michaud’s Necronomicon Press, Karl Edward Wagner’s Carcosa
Press, Harry O. Morris’s Silver Scarab Press, Robert M. Price’s magazine Crypt of Cthulhu, and John Navroth’s Pentagram Publications.
A number of small presses were founded in the aftermath of World
War II to reprint sf from the pulp magazines; several also salvaged material from Unknown. Gnome Press reprinted Robert E. Howard’s Conan series for the first time, as well as reprinting sword and sorcery by C. L. Moore and Fritz Leiber. Such specialist presses became effectively redundant after 1960, but a few that survived by specializing in collectible editions were drawn toward fantasy because of its greater illustrative potential; Underwood-Miller produced handsome editions of many books by Jack Vance, and Donald M. Grant repackaged Robert E. Howard. While small-press books were in the doldrums, small-press magazines multiplied rapidly, taking up the slack as the commercial magazines died out. Significant fantasy titles included Amra, Anduril, Dragonbane (issued by Charles de Lint’s Triskell Press), Kadath, Jessica Amanda Salmonson’s Literary Magazine of Fantasy & Terror, Robert Weinberg’s Lost Fantasies, The Silver Web, and the often-revived
Weird Tales.
When small-press books began to reappear in some quantity in the
1980s, many of their producers proved short-lived, including Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s and Dean Wesley Smith’s Pulphouse and the British Kerosina Publications, but others continually emerged to take their places. Those whose output made significant contributions to the evolution of fantasy literature include John Pelan’s Axolotl Press (which eventually morphed into Nightshade Books), Mark V. Ziesing, Phanta-sia Press, Will Shetterly’s Steeldragon Press, Jeff VanderMeer’s Ministry of Whimsy Press, and W. Paul Ganley’s and Sean Wallace’s Prime Press.
SMITH, CLARK ASHTON (1893–1961). U.S. writer. His poetry continued French-inspired traditions imported to the American West Coast by Ambrose Bierce and George Sterling, his imagination reaching its furthest extent in “The Hashish Eater; or, The Apocalypse of Evil”
(1922), which extrapolates the theme and manner of Sterling’s “The Wine of Wizardry.” The Arkham House Selected Poems (1971) is the most comprehensive sampler. In a brief period of hectic productivity in the 1930s—when he was greatly encouraged by H. P. Lovecraft—his
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prose fictions developed decadent style and sensibility to their furthest extreme in the context of “cosmic horror fiction” (refer to HSDF and HDHL).
Smith toyed with historical fantasy set in the imaginary French province of Averoigne, Atlantean fantasy, and prehistoric fantasy set in Hyperborea before realizing that the far-futuristic setting of Zothique—which he began to explore in “The Empire of the Necromancers”
(1932)—allowed his imagination its most extravagant and fatalistic expression. His stories were reprinted in the Arkham House collections Out of Space and Time(1942), Lost Worlds (1944), Genius Loci (1948), The Abominations of Yondo (1960), Tales of Science and Sorcery (1964), Poems in Prose (1964), and Other Dimensions (1970) before being sampled in numerous subsequent collections.
The Necronomicon Press volumes Tales of Zothique (1995) and The Book of Hyperborea (1996) include numerous restored texts. Previously unpublished materials were issued in Strange Shadows: The Uncollected Fiction and Essays of Clark Ashton Smith (1989), ed. Steve Behrends, with Donald Sidney-Fryer and Rah Hoffman. The Black Diamonds (2002) and the title story of The Sword of Zagan and Other Writings (2004) are Arabian fantasy novellas written when Smith was a teenager. Homages to his work include The Last Continent: New Tales of Zothique
(1999), ed. John Pelan, and The Sorcerer’s Apprentices: New Tales in the Tradition of Clark Ashton Smith (1999), ed. James Am-buehl.
SMITH, DAVID C. (1952– ). U.S. writer. His work is sword and sorcery fiction in the tradition of Robert E. Howard, including two series featuring Howard characters and the series comprising Oron (1978), The Sorcerer’s Shadow (1978), The Valley of Ogrum (1982), and The Ghost Army (1983). The apocalyptic fantasy trilogy comprising Master of Evil (1983), Sorrowing Vengeance (1983), and The Passing of the Gods (1984) adopts the premise that our world is just a poor copy of another.
SMITH, THORNE (1893–1934). U.S. writer best known for humorous/intrusive fantasies that reacted against the stern strictures of Prohibition in the same way that F. Anstey reacted against the stuffiness of English Victorian mores. In Topper (1926, aka The Jovial Ghosts), two fun lovers killed in a car crash find death no obstacle to their mission to loosen up the eponymous pillar of rectitude—a project continued in Topper Takes a Trip (1932). The Stray Lamb (1929) employs serial
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theriomorphy as an educative device. Turnabout (1931) echoes Anstey’s Vice Versa but exchanges the personalities of a man and wife.
The Night Life of the Gods (1931) similarly echoes The Tinted Venus on a more generous scale. Rain in the Doorway (1933) follows the same formula without using supernatural devices, employing a department store as a cornucopia. The protagonist of Skin and Bones (1933) finds periodic metamorphosis into a skeleton inconvenient, but the fount of youth in The Glorious Pool (1934) is much more helpful. Norman Matson completed The Passionate Witch (1941) in a cautionary fashion of which Smith might not have approved.
Smith also wrote the earnest hallucinatory fantasy Dream’s End (1927) before deciding that humor was his forte, and several earnest detective stories that may have inspired other crime writers to dabble in humorous fantasy similar to his; those who did include Frederick Arnold Kummer; Robert Bloch; Theodore Pratt, in Mr Limpet (1942) and Mr Thurkle’s Trolley (1947); James Hadley Chase, in Miss Shumway Waves a Wand (1944); Raymond Chandler, in “Professor Bingo’s Snuff” (1952); Manning Coles, in Brief Candles (1954) and Happy Returns (1955); and John D. MacDonald, in The Girl, the Gold Watch, and Everything (1962). The tradition was also carried forward by Nelson S. Bond and Charles F. Myers, but it died out in the 1960s as social mores became far less restrictive; there are few modern examples, although Jenna McKnight’s A Greek God at the Ladies’ Club (2003) retains something of its flavor.
SNYDER, MIDORI (1954– ). U.S. writer. Soulstring (1987) extrapolates a familiar fairy tale motif into an adventure fantasy. The Oran trilogy, comprising New Moon (1989), Sadar’s Keep (1990), and Beldan’s Fire (1993), incorporates elements of Celtic fantasy into an account of the renewal of magic in a land where it has long been suppressed. The Flight of Michael McBride (1994) incorporates similar materials into a complex contemporary fantasy. The Innamorati (1998) is a historical fantasy set in Renaissance Venice. Hannah’s Garden (2002) is a contemporary fantasy in which the heroine discovers her Faerie heritage.
Snyder is a leading contributor to Terri Windling’s Endicott Studio, assisting with the Journal of Mythic Arts.
SOMTOW, S. P. (1952– ). Thai writer who became a U.S. citizen. His early work, most of which is sf (refer to HDSFL), was bylined “Somtow Sucharitkul.” His new byline first appeared on a series of revisionist
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vampire novels, launched with Vampire Junction (1984), which lean more toward horror than many works of that kind. The Shattered Horse (1986) features an alternative Trojan War. The historical fantasy Moon Dance (1989), featuring a conflict between rival families of werewolves, is similarly dark (refer to HDHL), but The Fallen Country (1986), Forgetting Places (1987), and The Wizard’s Apprentice (1993) are lighthearted children’s fantasies. The trilogy comprising Riverrun (1991), Forests of the Night (1992, aka Armorica), and Yestern (1996 in the omnibus The Riverrun Trilogy) is a surreal contemporary fantasy in which protagonists are caught up in a battle to alter reality, with confusing effects. The fantasy element in The Pavilion of Frozen Woman is marginal, but the “modern Siamese tales” collected in Dragon’s Fin Soup (1998) are mostly fantasies, as are those in Tagging the Moon: Fairy Tales from L.A. (2000).
SOUTHEY, ROBERT (1774–1843). British poet, the brother-in-law of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Thalaba the Destroyer (1801) is a long Arabian fantasy in verse. Madoc (1805) is the story of a legendary Celtic prince who supposedly discovered America. The Curse of Kehama
(1810) is a similar exercise in Oriental fantasy. More significantly, Southey wrote new English versions of Amadis of Gaul (1803) and Palmerin of England (1807), two Iberian chivalric romances that had been immensely popular in the 16th century, thus introducing colorful heroic fantasy to 19th-century Britain.
SPANISH FANTASY. Spanish literature’s key contributions to the early evolution of fantasy included chivalric romances of a broader stripe than those popular in France (modern versions of the classic Amadis of Gaul are derived from Spanish versions, although its origin was probably Portuguese). It was, therefore, appropriate that Spain should have produced Miguel de Cervantes’s satirical requiem for the genre, Don Quixote, whose cautionary example may have damped down any conspicuous enthusiasm for romanticism two centuries later.
The leading Spanish fantasists of the 19th century, Pedro de Alarcón (1833–91)—author of the posthumous fantasy translated as The Strange Friend of Tito Gil (1852; tr. 1890, aka The Friend of Death)—
and Gustavo Bécquer (1836–70), were active half a century after the Romantic movements of northern Europe. Notable 20th-century works
include Wenceslao Flórez’s Las siete columnas (1926), in which the Devil takes back the seven deadly sins and removes all purpose from hu-
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man existence; Rafael Ferlosio’s extravagant children’s fantasy Industrias y andanzas de Alfanui (1951); and two collections of stories by Marcial Souto (1983; 1988).
Contemporary Spanish fantasists of note include Juan Miguel Aguil-
era, Elio Barceló, and the Catalan writer Joan Perucho. Notable recent works in translation include Gonzalo Torrente Ballester’s historical fantasy The King Amaz’d: A Chronicle (1989; tr. 1996); Cuca Canals’
Berta la Larga (1996; tr. 1998), in which a young woman’s moods affect the weather; Federico Andahazi’s The Merciful Women (1998; tr.
2000), in which John Polidori finds an unusual muse; Javier Garcia Sánchez’s The Others (1998; tr. 2003); and Juan Goytisolo’s A Cock-Eyed Comedy (2000; tr. 2002). The Dedalus Book of Spanish Fantasy (1999), ed. Margaret Jull Costa and Annella McDermott, is a useful showcase.
SPARK, MURIEL (1918– ). British writer whose works often have a surreal or fantastic edge. The Comforters (1957) is a metafiction in which the protagonist comes to the conclusion that she is merely a character in a book. In Memento Mori (1959), the telephone becomes a conduit of insistent reminders of mortality. The Bachelors (1960) is a spiritualist fantasy. The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960) features a practical joker who turns out to have cloven hooves. The Hothouse by the East River (1973) is a posthumous fantasy. Some of Spark’s short fiction—assembled in The Short Stories of Muriel Spark (1987)—has similarly coy but insistent supernatural elements.
SPENCE, LEWIS (1874–1955). Scottish scholar specializing in myths, legends, and folktales, many of which he recycled in a straightforward fashion. His own poetry and fiction was mostly trivial, but the reckless syncretism of his scholarly fantasies provided a template for a great deal of early 20th-century fantasy derived from the same (mostly fantastic) sources as his Encyclopedia of Occultism (1920). He wrote several books attempting to illuminate The Problem of Atlantis (1924) and one on The Problem of Lemuria (1932), but his most ambitious project was a speculative reconstruction of The Mysteries of Britain (1928), extrapolated in The Magic Arts of Celtic Britain (1945), British Fairy Origins (1946), The Fairy Tradition in
Britain (1948), The Minor Traditions of British Mythology (1948), and The History and Origins of Druidism (1949), which made a substantial contribution to the ideological background of Celtic fantasy.
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SPENSER, EDMUND (1552–1599). English poet whose work made
abundant use of myth and folklore, especially the unfinished epic The Faerie Queene (1590: exp. 1596; further exp. 1609), a massive mock-archaic fusion of Arthurian/chivalric romance with fairy mythology, allegorizing and idealizing the reign of Elizabeth I with the aid of considerable borrowing from Lodovico Ariosto. The Faerie Queene became an important exemplar in both manner and content, and a significant precursor of romanticism. J. R. R. Tolkien’s attempt to produce an “English epic” devoid of Norman intrusions obviously had it in mind as an idol to be cast down. William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream may be considered an example of “Spenserian fantasy,”
although Michael Drayton’s tongue-in-cheek Nymphidia (1627) is more obviously derivative, as are L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt’s
“The Mathematics of Magic” and Michael Moorcock’s Gloriana.
SPIRITUALIST FANTASY. Spiritualism originated as a 19th-century fad—launched by the Fox sisters in New York State in 1848—for receiving gnomic messages from the dead, in the form of “rapping” and table tipping. In spite of being exposed as frauds, the Fox sisters became the archetypes of a vast number of “mediums,” whose activities became the core of a new religion. Mediums receiving more lucid messages usually operate with the aid of “guides” or “controls” in the world of the dead, who institute contact with spirits, whose voices are “channeled”
through the medium during “seances,” so that information may be