The A to Z of Fantasy Literature

by Stableford, Brian M.

  Her other fantasies for older readers include The Mirror Image Ghost (1994) and The If Game (2001), the latter featuring a series of keys to secret doors. Her short fiction is sampled in Cold Marble and Other Ghost Stories (1985).

  STRAUSS, VICTORIA (1955– ). U.S. writer. The Lady of Rhuddesmere (1982) is a claustrophobic political fantasy. Worldstone (1986) is a portal fantasy in which the heroine has extraordinary abilities.

  Guardian of the Hills (1995) is an archaeological fantasy drawing on native American myths. The couplet comprising The Arm of the Stone (1998) and The Garden of the Stone (1999) is founded on an allegory in which the world has been split apart by a conflict between Mind and Hand. In The Burning Land (2004), renegade shapers who oppose an organized religion—described in unusual detail—must go in search of the lost city of Refuge.

  STRICKLAND, BRAD (1947– ). U.S. writer in various genres, mostly for young children. The trilogy of humorous fantasies comprising Moon Dreams (1988), Nul’s Quest (1989), and Wizard’s Mole (1991) employs a hallucinatory fantasy frame. In Dragon’s Plunder (1992), a boy is abducted by pirates because he can whistle up the wind. Strickland completed several fantasies left incomplete by John Bellairs and continued the series to which they belonged. He wrote The Ghost Finds a Body (2003) in collaboration with Thomas E. Fuller.

  STURGEON, THEODORE (1918–1985). U.S. writer born Edward

  Hamilton Waldo, who chose a new given name when he adopted his

  stepfather’s surname. He began to write humorous fantasies for Un-

  known in 1939, soon diverging into sf (refer to HDSFL) and horror (refer to HDHL). His contes cruels are often invested with a ferocious emotional intensity, which also infects longer stories like the neo-Arthurian “Excalibur and the Atom” (1951) and the neo-Gothic The Dreaming Jewels (1950, aka The Synthetic Man). He usually employed

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  the sf jargon of “psi powers” in stories in which individuals granted supernatural powers must learn to use them responsibly, while his pure fantasies tended to the sentimental, as in “The Silken Swift” (1953) and

  “The Graveyard Reader” (1958).

  In the harrowing existentialist fantasy “Need” (in Beyond, 1960), a man gifted with extraordinary empathy struggles to cope with the pain of others. Some of Your Blood (1961) is a psychological fantasy anticipating developments in revisionist vampire fiction. A nearly lifelong writer’s block thereafter caused Sturgeon to leave the ambitious messianic fantasy Godbody (1986) far short of completion. Sturgeon’s bibliography is complex, but The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon— whose first nine volumes are The Ultimate Egoist (1994), Microcosmic God (1995), Killdozer! (1996), Thunder and Roses (1997), The Perfect Host (1998), Baby Is Three (1999), A Saucer of Loneliness (2000), Bright Segment (2002), and And Now the News . . . (2003)—is definitive.

  SURREALISM. A term coined by Guillaume Apollinaire to describe the fantasizing effects he and Alfred Jarry themselves employed; it was taken up by André Breton in a Surrealist Manifesto (1924; exp. 1929), which proposed that the crudities of bourgeois rationalism—as reflected in mimetic literature—could and should be overwhelmed by art that disowned any allegiance to mere representation, mining the unconscious via the imagery of dreams. The movement achieved much greater success in the visual arts—via Salvador Dali, Max Ernst, René Magritte, and many others—than it did in literature, where surreal techniques often produced a fatal obliteration of narrative coherence.

  With Paul Eluard, Breton wrote the exemplary prose poems making up The Immaculate Conception (1930; tr. 1990). Other notable examples of surrealist fiction include Pierre Albert Birot’s The First Book of Grabi-noulor (1919), Robert Desnos’s Liberty or Love! (1924; tr. 1993), Robert M. Coates’s The Eater of Darkness (1926) and René Daumal’s A Night of Serious Drinking (1938; tr. 1979). Samplers include The Dedalus Book of Surrealism: The Identity of Things (1993); The Dedalus Book of Surrealism 2: The Myth of the World (1994), ed. Michael Richardson; and two Printed Head sets of chapbooks produced by the specialist small press Atlas (1990–91; 1992–93). Surrealist painters who produced literary fantasies include Dali, in Hidden Faces (1944; tr. 1947), and the British surrealist Ithell Colquhoun (1906–88), author of Goose of Hermogenes (1961). Michael Ende is the son of a surrealist painter.

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  A significant element of surrealism is preserved and productively deployed by many modern fabulations; it has been further encouraged by the postmodernist fascination with the uncertain relationship between representation—especially linguistic representation—and reality, as reflected in such works as Michael Cisco’s The Divinity Student (1999), Brian Charles Clark’s Splitting (1999), and Amanda Filipacchi’s Vapor (1999). Fantasy novels about the surrealist movement include Lisa Goldstein’s The Dream Years and Robert Irwin’s Exquisite Corpse.

  SWANN, THOMAS BURNETT (1928–1976). U.S. scholar and writer

  whose heartfelt classical fantasies could not find a domestic market at first, many of them appearing in the British magazine Science-Fantasy.

  “Where Is the Bird of Fire?” (1962; exp. as Lady of the Bees 1976; the 1970 book Where Is the Bird of Fire? is a collection) recycles and transfigures the legend of Rome’s founding in a typically poignant and polished manner; Queens Walk in the Dusk (1977) and Green Phoenix (1972) are prequels to it. The elegiac Day of the Minotaur (1966) depicts the thinning of the world of Greek myth; Cry Silver Bells (1977) and The Forest of Forever (1971) similarly provided prequels. Other classical fantasies include the 1963 title novella of The Dolphin and the Deep (1968), The Weirwoods (1967), and Wolfwinter (1972).

  The Minikins of Yam 1976) is set in ancient Egypt. Moondust (1968) and How Are the Mighty Fallen (1974) are biblical fantasies. The Gods Abide (1976) is an allegory comparing classical and Christian worldviews. The Tournament of Thorns (1976), Will-o’-the-Wisp (1976, featuring the poet Robert Herrick), The Not-World (1975, featuring Elizabeth Barrett Browning), and The Goat without Horns (1971) are historical fantasies. Swann’s scholarly endeavors included a study of the decadent poet Ernest Dowson. His mother commemorated his passing by sponsoring a series of academic conferences, which provided the seed of the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts.

  SWANWICK, MICHAEL J. (1950– ). U.S. writer best known for sf (refer to HDSFL) before he moved in the direction of what he called—in the essay “In the Tradition . . .” (1994; reprinted in The Postmodern Archipelago, 1997)—“hard fantasy.” The move is symbolically recapitulated in the plot development of the quest fantasy The Iron Dragon’s Daughter (1993), in which the heroine experiences a series of milieux mapping the conventional spectra of science fantasy and urban fantasy. Jack Faust (1997) is a Faustian fantasy in which the hero’s

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  Mephistophelean informant enables him to see the Industrial Revolution from its beginning to its implicit end within the space of a single generation. Short stories in the same vein are collected in A Geography of Unknown Lands (1997).

  SWIFT, JONATHAN (1667–1745). Irish satirist whose Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World in Four Parts . . . by Lemuel Gulliver (1726; aka Gulliver’s Travels) defined the category of Swiftian satire.

  The first part, in which Gulliver visits the miniature civilization of Lilliput, is frequently echoed in modern fantasy; his second excursion to the land of giants, Brobdingnag, is similarly exemplary. The scathing fourth part, which inverts the roles of horses and humans, exerted a powerful influence on many animal fantasies. Swift’s essays sometimes adopt fabular form, as in the frame story of A Tale of a Tub (1704) and the item familiarly known as “The Battle of the Books,” from the same volume.

  Modern spin-off from Gulliver’s Travels includes T. H. White’s Mistress Masham’s Repose; Willis Hall’s series begun with The Return of the Antelope (1985; aka The Secret Visitors); Alison Fell’s The Mistress of Lilliput; or, The Pursuit (1999), which tracks the advent
ures of Gulliver’s wife; and the first and last stories in Adam Roberts’s Swiftly (2004).

  SWINBURNE, ALGERNON (1837–1909). British poet acquainted with the pre-Raphaelites, who became a significant influence on the French Decadent movement after spending some years in exile in Normandy.

  His verse dramas Atalanta in Calydon (1865) and Erechtheus (1876) are classical fantasies, and he used similar materials in some of the fervent erotic inclusions in Poems and Ballads (1866), including “Hymn to Proserpine.” He addressed Arthurian subjects in such poems as the title piece of Tristram of Lyonesse and Other Poems (1882).

  SWORD AND SORCERY. A term coined by Fritz Leiber in response to Michael Moorcock’s plea for a category label descriptive of the kind of fiction pioneered by Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories and gradually sophisticated by L. Sprague de Camp, Fletcher Pratt, Leiber, and himself. De Camp became the subgenre’s most clamorous popularizer, editing the showcase anthology Swords and Sorcery (1963) and several successors; the success of the subgenre in the paperback book medium was an important element in the establishment of commodified fantasy. Sword and sorcery fiction overlaps heroic fantasy considerably

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  but is differentiated by its unashamed emphasis on action/adventure elements and by its generous hospitality to picaresque elements—the latter being lovingly developed by Leiber, de Camp, Jack Vance, and Michael Shea and formularized by the Thieves World shared-world series.

  The subgenre’s focus on swordplay carried forward a swashbuckling

  tradition initiated by the French feuilletonists but routinely transplanted its highly skilled fighting men into imaginary prehistoric milieux where black magic and demonic activity are rife. Its practitioners took inspiration from Edgar Rice Burroughs’s uninhibited adventure fantasies and Lord Dunsany’s neo-chivalric romances as well as Howard’s definitive exemplars, and Clark Ashton Smith established far-futuristic fantasy as an alternative matrix. Many paperback sword and sorcery writers were encouraged by marketing considerations to employ planetary romances and parallel worlds as convenient frameworks, paving the way for Moorcock’s construction of a generically omnivorous multiverse. C. L. Moore introduced the first female hero to the subgenre, founding a tradition carried forward by such writers as Jessica Amanda Salmonson and Marion Zimmer Bradley.

  The flood unleashed when sword and sorcery fiction first became

  commodified—which included a great deal of rough-hewn, mechani-

  cally violent, formularized fiction—had abated somewhat by the end of the 20th century, when forms of heroic fantasy focusing on individual characters became noticeably less violent than the collective endeavors of military fantasy.

  SYMBOLISM. A literary technique that makes objects, landscapes, or exemplary actions serve as signifiers of human emotions, ambitions, or endeavors. In all literary works, but especially in fantastic ones, weather tends to symbolize the moods and predicaments of the characters, and dreams are almost always symbolic of their psychological predicaments. Flowers, bodies of water, and timepieces are other favorite symbolically loaded items. A Symbolist movement, organized around the aesthetic theories of Stéphane Mallarmé and provided with a manifesto by Jean Morés, emerged out of the Decadent movement, but symbolism was so central to the literary methods associated with the decadent style that it was never fully differentiated. Because overt symbolism is the fundamental method of allegory and satire—and also because chivalric romances were often saturated with symbolism—the descendants of all these subgenres in modern fantasy carry similarly full cargoes, but

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  there is no part of the fantasy spectrum that does not take full advantage of the opportunities offered by fantastic devices for symbolic display and resonance.

  SYMONDS, JOHN (1914– ). British writer. His nonfiction includes studies of Madame Blavatsky and Aleister Crowley, but the great majority of his own fantasies have been quirky children’s books, including The Magic Currant Bun (1952), Lottie (1957), Elfrida and the Pig (1959), and Dapple Grey: The Story of a Rocking Horse (1962). His adult fiction includes the allegory William Waste (1947), the occult fantasy The Guardian of the Threshold (1980), and the Shakespearean fantasy play Tower above the Clouds (1994).

  SYRETT, NETTA (c1870–1943). British writer associated with the circle surrounding The Yellow Book, whose belief in her own psychic powers infected some of her adult romances, including Barbara of the Thorn (1913) and the quasi-autobiographical Angel Unawares (1936). Her most important contribution to fantasy literature consists of fairy tales for children; her first collection, The Garden of Delight (1898), was followed by The Magic City and Other Fairy Tales (1903) and a collection of Six Fairy Plays (1904). Her conviction that fairies were real, though perceptible only to those with appropriate powers, is further reflected in her Christmas anthology The Dream Garden (1905) and her collection Godmother’s Garden (1918). The Castle of Four Towers (1909) transforms an Italian town into a fairy realm. Magic London (1922; rev.

  1933) uses timeslips to construct a wide-ranging historical fantasy.

  Her other story collections include The Endless Journey and Other Stories (1912) and The Magic Castle and Other Stories (1922). More plays were collected in Robin Goodfellow and Other Fairy Plays (1918) and The Fairy Doll and Other Plays for Children (1922).

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  TALL STORY. An oral narrative in which the speaker exaggerates, often increasing the level of exaggeration by degrees until the tale becomes ludicrous. Fishermen and travelers are notorious for such exaggeration, and tales repeated by a series of tellers tend to grow as their tellings proliferate. Most tall stories replicated in literary form are travelers’

  tales; the archetypal examples are the exploits of Menippus recorded by

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  Lucian and Baron Münchhausen’s accounts of his adventures, as recorded by R. E. Raspe.

  In the United States, where they were manufactured on a prolific

  scale in the 19th century, tall stories have a particular association with the myth of the western frontier; their literary exploitation was pioneered by Mark Twain and was carried forward in such texts as Vincent McHugh’s sprawling historical fantasy Caleb Catlum’s America (1936) and infecting a good deal of modern American humorous writing, including works by Robert Bloch and L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt’s Tales from Gavagan’s Bar.

  British tall stories feature strongly in the tradition of humorous fantasy maintained by such writers as R. H. Barham and Douglas Jerrold; they frequently take the form of “club stories” narrated at con-vivial gatherings, like those reproduced in Dryasdust’s Tales of the Wonder Club. Regional variants include the northern tales exemplified in Eric Knight’s Sam Small Flies Again (1942; aka The Flying Yorkshireman) and such examples of Irish “blarney” as those collected in Desmond Ryan’s Saint Eustace and the Albatross (1935).

  Sports fantasy is also hospitable to tall stories, as exemplified by the work in the subgenre of W. P. Kinsella and Maurice Richardson.

  TAM LIN. A Scottish ballad in which the heroine encounters the eponymous kinsman from a former era, who was taken into Faerie as a lover of its queen—while time passed far more rapidly in the primary

  world—but will now be offered as a tribute to Hell if the heroine cannot save him. It is similar to various accounts of Thomas the Rhymer, who is cursed by the fairy queen with an inability to lie when he returns belatedly to the primary world. Diana Wynne Jones’s Fire and Hemlock combines the two stories. Other notable transfigurations include works by Susan Cooper, Dahlov Ipcar, Patricia McKillip, Pamela Dean, and Gael Baudino, Holly Black’s Tithe: A Modern Fairy Tale (2002), and Janet McNaughton’s An Earthly Knight (2004). Sally Prue’s Cold Tom (2002) describes the tribulations of an elf who is the half-breed son of Tam Lin. Jo Walton’s Tam Lin is credited to William Shakespeare.

  TAPROOT TEXT. A term defined in the Clute/Grant Encyclopedia with reference to pre-18th-century
texts from which modern fantasy literature draws significant inspiration and imagery. Because fantasy literature is descended from oral traditions, with references to marvelous en-

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  tities and events that take their authority from tradition, it routinely justifies its fantastic devices as things that were once commonplace but have long been subject to a thinning process. Many fantasy stories refer back to oral—or purely imaginary—sources, but there is a particular authority in the written word that makes ancient texts very useful as sources of raw material. It is for this reason that imaginary sources are often represented as hypothetical texts. The more fanciful an actual text is and the more its content resonates with an author’s literary purpose and ambition, the more useful it becomes as a potential source of tap-pable nourishment. Scholarly fantasies and lifestyle fantasies are so dependent on taproot texts that a considerable industry is devoted to fak-ing them, but fantasy literature has the advantage of not having to represent its taproot texts as works of “nonfiction.”

  TARR, JUDITH (1955– ). U.S. writer whose historical fiction—including historical fantasies—is conscientiously detailed. The trilogy comprising The Isle of Glass (1985), The Golden Horn (1985), and The Hounds of God (1986) employs a rich medieval setting. The series comprising The Hall of the Mountain King (1986), The Lady of Han-Gilen (1987), A Fall of Princes (1988), Arrows of the Sun (1993), Spear of Heaven (1994), and Tides of Darkness (2002) is cast as planetary romance, but its backcloth is similarly detailed. A Wind in Cairo (1989) is set in medieval Egypt, Ars Magica (1989) in Europe, Alamut (1989) and The Dagger and the Cross (1991) in the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem. His Majesty’s Elephant (1993) features Charlemagne’s half-witch daughter.