The A to Z of Fantasy Literature

by Stableford, Brian M.

  Fantasy elements are marginal to Lord of the Two Lands (1993), Throne of Isis (1994), Pillar of Fire (1995), and King and Goddess (1996) but more central to the Epona trilogy, comprising White Mare’s Daughter (1998), The Shepherd Kings (1999), and Daughter of Lir (2001); Lady of Horses (2000) is a prequel. Household Gods (1999

  with Harry Turtledove) is a timeslip fantasy. Kingdom of the Grail (2000) integrates the story of Roland into the body of Arthurian legend. Pride of Kings (2001) deals with the seduction of England’s King John by a magical youth from the East; its sequels Devil’s Bargain (2002) and House of War (2003) feature Richard the Lionheart. In Queen of the Amazons (2004), Hippolyta’s daughter meets Alexander the Great. In Rite of Conquest (2004), a sorceress joins the court of the magically talented William of Normandy before he invades England to defeat Harold in 1066.

  398 • TAYLOR, G. P.

  TAYLOR, G. P. (?– ). British writer. While serving as the vicar of Raven-scar in Yorkshire, he published the fervent, disguised Christian fantasy Shadowmancer (2002), which attracted enough attention to persuade a commercial publisher to release a new edition on the same day as J. K.

  Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix—a ploy that boosted it to best-seller status. Wormwood (2004) is a similarly encoded historical fantasy set in 1750s London.

  TAYLOR, KEITH (1946– ). Australian writer. A series of short stories bylined Denis More (1975–77) was revised into the novel Bard (1981), a Celtic fantasy in which the hero is equipped with a magical harp; Taylor published the planetary romance Lances of Negesdul (1982) before continuing the series in Bard II (1984, aka The First Long Ship), The Wild Sea (1986), Raven’s Fathering (1987), and Felimid’s Homecoming (1991), which also have elements of Nordic fantasy. The trilogy comprising The Sorcerer’s Sacred Isle (1989), The Cauldron of Plenty (1989), and Search for the Starblade (1990) is an orthodox quest fantasy in a similar setting.

  TAYLOR, ROGER (1938– ). British writer. The Chronicles of Hawklan series, comprising The Call of the Sword (1988), The Fall of Fyorlund (1989), The Waking of Orthlund (1989), Into Narsindal (1990), and The Return of the Sword (1999), is formularized commodified fantasy.

  Dream Finder (1991) is set in a more civilized milieu reminiscent of Renaissance Italy. The couplet comprising Farnor (1992) and Valderen (1993) is an elaborate heroic fantasy; its conclusions about the costs of heroism are carried farther forward in Ibryen (1995). Whistler (1994) is a satire on religion and politics. Arash-Felloren (1996) and Caddoran (1998) reverted to stereotypy.

  TELEVISION. TV’s heavy dependence on segmental series—enforced by the necessity of making programs in batches to occupy regular time slots—makes it difficult to employ fantasy materials in drama, although the standard formula derived from crime fiction, in which virtuous heroes (or superheroes) work through a series of cases, edged into fantasy via the “vigilante angel” subgenre pioneered by Highway to Heaven and Touched by an Angel. In the early days of the medium, much greater success was enjoyed by humorous fantasies in the tradition of Thorne Smith, in such shows as Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie, whose descendants—notably, Sabrina the Teenage Witch—gradually took on more dramatic tension. Dramas cast in a similar mold, like Charmed, were careful to retain an element of humor.

  TEMPLARS • 399

  The first TV fantasy to spawn a successful line of tie-in books was the strikingly anomalous timeslip soap opera Dark Shadows, which made the most of its American Gothic ambience. When a new suite of special effects and the influence of nascent genre fantasy spawned a new generation of TV heroic fantasy—spearheaded by Hercules: The Fantastic Journeys and Xena: Warrior Princess—the trickle of TV tie-ins became a flood, but the most successful were those that retained a soap-operatic element, including Charmed and the horror series Buffy the Vampire Slayer. This is understandable, given that the visual medium requires no assistance in depicting the action-adventure component of the fiction, whereas emotional undercurrents benefit considerably from literary augmentation.

  In the late 20th century, TV became the primary medium of anima-

  tion, with limitations that were further constrained by tight regulation of the kinds of violence depicted in children’s cartoons made for U.S. network TV after 1980. The primary effect of this restriction was that animations not subject to the restrictions took full advantage of their exemption, with results that were often surreal as well as calculatedly gross; the influence of such developments on literary fantasy has been muted and marginal but not entirely negligible.

  TEMPLARS. An order of warrior-monks founded in the early 12th century to protect the pilgrims who flocked to the Holy Land following the capture of Jerusalem in 1099; its early headquarters were near the site of the Temple, from which it took its name. The order grew exceedingly rich, not only taking over the property of its members and receiving liberal gifts from supporters, but functioning as a bank, accepting deposits from pilgrims, and issuing letters of credit honored throughout Christendom. When the Christians were expelled from the Holy Land in

  1291, the Templars lost their ostensible function; Philippe IV of France took the opportunity to raid their wealth in 1307, justifying the seizure by means of confessions of idolatry extracted by torture. The confessions became the seed of many tales of hidden treasure, of which the more imaginative were integrated into every notable secret history featured in modern literature and a great deal of scholarly fantasy, in which the Templars often feature as custodians of the Holy Grail.

  Dramatizations of the Templars’ fate are featured in Pierre Klossowski’s The Baphomet (1965 in French; tr. 1988)—in which shades reenact the legend, illustrating the Nietzschean doctrine of eternal recurrence—and Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum. James D. MacDonald’s The Apocalypse

  400 • TENNANT, EMMA

  Door (2002) features an alternative history in which the Templars fight on. Katherine Kurtz edited the anthologies Crusade of Fire: Mystical Tales of the Knights Templar (1997) and On Crusade: More Tales of the Knights Templar (1998).

  TENNANT, EMMA (1937– ). British writer whose literary fiction often has fantastic elements. In Hotel de Dream (1976), dreams that interact with one another eventually begin to affect the waking environment; Wild Nights (1979) is similarly hallucinatory. The Bad Sister (1978) and Two Women of London: The Strange Case of Ms. Jekyll and Mrs Hyde (1989) are doppelgänger stories based on classic models. Alice Fell (1980) is an Orphean fantasy in the style of Lewis Carroll. The Magic Drum (1989) is a ghost story. Sisters and Strangers (1990) has marginal elements of biblical fantasy. Faustine (1992) is a transfigurative Faustian fantasy. Her children’s fantasies include The Boggart (1980) and The Ghost Child (1984).

  TEPPER, SHERI S. (1929– ). U.S. writer in various genres. Most of her work is sf (refer to HDSFL), but a good deal of it is cosmetically dressed as fantasy, including the three trilogies of the True Game sequence, the first comprising King’s Blood Four (1983), Necromancer Nine (1983), and Wizard’s Eleven (1984), the second The Song of Mavin Manyshaped (1985), The Flight of Mavin Manyshaped (1985), and The Search for Mavin Manyshaped (1985), and the third Jinian Footseer (1985), Dervish Daughter (1985), and Jinian Star-Eye (1986). The Revenants (1984) and the trilogy comprising Marianne, the Magus and the Manticore (1985), Marianne, the Madame and the Momentary Gods (1988), and Marianne, the Matchbox, and the Malachite Mouse (1989) are more wholeheartedly fantastic but similarly rule bound. The Awakeners (2

  vols., 1987) was the first of several planetary romances with sf elements that emerge only in the later phases—a pattern also evident in Beauty (1991), which begins as a transfiguration of a familiar fairy tale but is eventually retransfigured. A Plague of Angels (1993) is a similarly hybridized far-futuristic fantasy.

  THEATER. The mythical elements in Greek tragedy and the satirical manner of Greek comedy equipped the theater with sturdy and highly influential fantastic taproot texts, which continued to feed the medium throughout its history. The difficulty o
f contriving fantastic effects—

  which required such conventions as the god-lowering device that gave

  THEATER • 401

  birth to the expression “deus ex machina”—was never allowed to stand in the way of representation. Mystery plays and miracle plays maintained the dramatic tradition while theaters were virtually obliterated; the rebirth of drama in the late Renaissance had such popular traditions as the Italian commedia dell’arte to draw on.

  Despite the great strides it made toward naturalism, English Elizabethan drama retained a substantial fantasy component in various plays featuring the Devil and his minions, including Robert Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (c1589; pub. 1594), Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus (c1593; pub. 1604), the anonymous The Merry Devil of Edmonton (1608), Thomas Dekker’s If This Be Not a Good Play, the Devil Is in It (1610), and Ben Jonson’s The Devil Is An Ass (1616). Once they had been introduced by William Shakespeare, fairies began to appear in other dramas, including Jonson’s The Satyr (1603) and Oberon the Fairy Prince (1610), while witches were perennially popular, as in Jonson’s Masque of Queens (1609); such subgenres as wish-fulfillment fantasy cropped up in comedies like Dekker’s Old Fortunatus (1600). The 17th-century French theatrical tradition founded by Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine made extravagant use of classical materials.

  In keeping with the general thinning of the literary tradition, fantasy elements became marginal even in comedies and Gothic melodramas during the 18th and 19th centuries, but they gained ground again in connection with the Romantic movement, becoming especiually prominent in such late products as the works of Gerhardt Hauptmann and Maurice Maeterlinck. The export of Maeterlinck’s allegorical “fairy plays” was assisted by the popularity in England of “fairy extravaganzas”—spectacular tableaux featuring gorgeously attired fairy queens accompanied by courts of winged children. The tradition continued into the 20th century in pantomimes, and the “topsyturvydom” of W. S.

  Gilbert retained a more reverent fantasy component in the work of such playwrights as J. M. Barrie and and Laurence Housman.

  W. B. Yeats founded the Abbey Theatre in Dublin—with backing from Annie Horniman, whom he had met via his interest in Rosicrucianism—

  with the express purpose of evoking “the spirit of the ancient Celt,” in opposition to the pevailing trend toward naturalism, but his own plays were less popular than those of Lady Augusta Gregory—whose recyclings of Irish “folk history” were de-supernaturalized, although her fairy plays for children, including The Golden Apple (1916) and The Dragon (1917)

  402 • THEOSOPHICAL FANTASY

  were not—and the project eventually had to be rescued by the determined realism of Sean O’Casey and J. M. Synge. British and American drama went the same way, fantasy thriving mainly in work aimed specifically at children, as exemplified by the work of Nicholas Stuart Gray. The Gothic melodramatic tradition that had given birth to the French Grand Guignol theatre—which specialized in horror—and such classic moralistic fantasies as the Erckmann-Chatrian-based The Bells and E. Temple Thurston’s The Wandering Jew (1920), similarly fell into terminal decline despite the efforts of impresario Todd Slaughter, who preserved it in England until the early 1950s. A healthy satirical tradition was maintained in Eastern Europe by such playwrights as Karel C

  âpek and Slavomir

  Mrozek, but it had little influence on English-language work.

  Most 20th-century fantasy plays are nowadays best known through

  their movie versions, partly because the additional capacity for special effects makes for more effective production; such works as Ferenc Molnar’s Liliom (1909; tr. 1921), Alberto Casella’s Death Takes a Holiday (tr. 1930), and Harry Segall’s Heaven Can Wait (1940) would be forgotten had they not been continually remade for cinema and TV. ( Liliom was Americanized as the musical Carousel, and Heaven Can Wait became Here Comes Mr. Jordan, its title having already been borrowed for another movie.)

  The kind of fantasy most amenable to stage production is intrusive fantasy featuring single supernatural visitors—including ghost stories and other accounts of revenants—as exemplified by Molnar’s The Devil (1907), David Belasco’s The Return of Peter Grimm (1911), and Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit (1941). Timeslips are also easy to contrive, as in J. B. Priestley’s time plays, John Balderston and J. C. Squire’s Berkeley Square (1928; based on Henry James’s unfinished novel The Sense of the Past, 1917), and Tom Stoppard’s The Invention of Love (1997).

  Modern theater companies specializing in fantasy include Chris and Tim Britton’s Forkbeard Fantasy company; its calculatedly chimerical productions include The Fall of the House of Usherettes (1995), The Barbers of Surreal (1998), and Frankenstein: The True Story (2001).

  Although the intrinsic “magic of the theater” is far less widely celebrated than the magic of music, it is manifest in numerous works by Angela Carter and Fritz Leiber, and in Michael Ende’s Ophelia’s Shadow Theater.

  THEOSOPHICAL FANTASY. The Theosophical Society, founded in

  1875 by Madame Blavatsky, survived and thrived throughout the 20th

  THERIOMORPHIC FANTASY • 403

  century, sometimes taking aboard other occultists whose own lifestyle fantasies were floundering, including Dion Fortune and Mrs. Campbell Praed, and occasionally spawning its own offshoots, like Rudolf Steiner’s breakaway movement Anthroposophy.

  Theosophy’s associated scholarly fantasies became significant feed-ers of fantasy literature; elements of their account of prehistory, involving various “root races” and elaborate versions of Atlantis and Lemuria, were widely borrowed and modified, as in the works of E. Charles Vivian, F. Marion Crawford’s Mr Isaacs, Franz Hartmann’s The Talking Image of Urur (1890), and Muriel Bruce’s Mukara (1930). Many aspects of theosophical prehistory were incorporated into sword and sorcery fiction by Robert E. Howard and his successors. Madame Blavatsky’s claim to have received the details of The Secret Doctrine from a Tibetan cadre of Hidden Masters whose Himalayan hideaway includes a vast library of occult lore has also been widely reflected in 20th-century fantasy, forming a background element of action/adventure fantasy by such writers as Talbot Mundy and E. Hoffman Price.

  The most notable practicing theosophist to write a significant quantity of fantasy was Kenneth Morris, whose use of its doctrines is unusually delicate. Michael Moorcock’s fantasy frequently displays echoes of his education at a Steiner school. The most active of several theosophical publishing houses still extant is Quest Books, in the United States. It occasionally publishes such recycled fiction as John Matthews’s The Song of Arthur: Celtic Tales from the King’s Court (2002), and The Song of Taliesin: Tales from King Arthur’s Bard (2003); the range of its nonfiction extends as far as Robert Ellwood’s Frodo’s Quest: Living the Myth in The Lord of the Rings (2002). Theosophical fantasies kept in print by the society’s Madras center include Mabel Collins’s The Idyll of the White Lotus (1919).

  THERIOMORPHIC FANTASY. Fantasy featuring transmutations be-

  tween human and animal form; the Clute/Grant Encyclopedia prefers the term “shapeshifting,” which implies a degree of conscious control, or at least a regularity and reversibility. Control and reversibility are, however, by no means universal in theriomorphic fantasy, where

  transformations of humans into animals are often arbitrarily inflicted, perhaps by way of amusement or punishment—a notion deeply rooted

  in classical myth and reproduced in such stories as David Garnett’s Lady into Fox (1922), Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis, Thorne Smith’s The Stray Lamb, Geoffrey Dearmer’s They Chose to Be Birds

  404 • THINNING

  (1935), Vercors’s Sylva (1961), Doranna Durgin’s Dun Lady’s Jess, Jerry Jay Carroll’s Top Dog (1996), Melvin Burgess’s Lady: My Life as a Bitch, and N. M. Browne’s Hunted. The most popular pattern of transformation that invites description as shapeshifting is that associated with werewolves, whose literary exemplars mostly straddle
the border between fantasy and horror fiction.

  Folktales are rich in theriomorphic imagery, the “swan maiden” being one of the standard motifs identified by Edward Hartland; the frog that might turn into a prince if kissed provides the raw material of a popular modern metaphor. Other folkloristic theriomorphs widely featured in fantasy literature include selkies, or “seal maidens,” as featured in Ronald Lockley’s Seal Woman (1974), Paul Brandon’s Swim the Moon (2001), and Peter Dickinson’s Inside Grandad (2004). Accounts of educational theriomorphy include Selma Lagerlöf’s Nils series, T. H.

  White’s The Book of Merlyn and K. A. Applegate’s Animorphs series.

  More orthodox accounts of shapeshifting involving animals other than wolves include Fred Saberhagen’s Dancing Bears, Robin Jarvis’s Hagwood series, Kate Thompson’s Switchers (1997), Jane Lindskold’s Changer, and Alanna Morland’s Leopard Lord (1999).

  THINNING. A term coined by John Clute in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy to describe the common assumption of fantasy texts that the primary world has become less magical over time. The assumption is inherited from folktales, in which narrative voices are often acutely conscious of the fact that the time is long gone when animals talked, the gods walked the earth, or the fairy folk held regular intercourse with humankind, an age nostalgically consigned to some Arcadian era or dreamtime. Notable accounts of thinning include Anatole France’s “Saint Satyr,”

  Richard Garnett’s “The Twilight of the Gods,” Thomas Burnett Swann’s Day of the Minotaur, Kerstin Ekman’s The Forest Hours (1988

  in Swedish; tr. 1998), and Lilian Nattel’s The River Midnight (1999).

  There is an interesting subcategory of stories in which thinning is represented as a deliberate process tidying up the chaotic residue of past magical conflicts. Notable examples include John Brunner’s The Traveller in Black (1971; exp. 1987), Orson Scott Card’s Hart’s Hope, Brian Stableford’s The Last Days of the Edge of the World (1978), and Sean Russell’s River into Darkness.