M. Browne’s Basilisk.
UNICORN. A mythical species of horse equipped with a single horn, often helical in form, projecting from the forehead. One legend alleges that a unicorn can be gentled only by a virgin, lending the motif considerable symbolic power in such erotic fantasies as Theodore Sturgeon’s “The Silken-Swift.” Its reputation for extreme rarity justifies its crucial roles in such quest fantasies as Alan Garner’s Elidor and Peter S. Beagle’s The Last Unicorn. When a unicorn’s head was adopted as the symbol of Lin Carter’s Ballantine Adult Fantasy series, however, unicorns soon became extremely common in fantasy illustration. They were integrated into the standardized apparatus of commodified fantasy, appearing in such series as Bruce Coville’s Unicorn Chronicles, the one begun with John Lee’s The Unicorn Quest (1986), and Meredith Ann Pierce’s Firebringer trilogy. Such was their popularity that Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois’s anthology Unicorns! (1982) required supplementation by Unicorns II (1992); similar items include The Unicorn Treasury (1988), ed. Bruce Coville, and Peter S. Beagle’s Immortal Unicorn (1995), ed. Beagle and Janet Berliner.
UNKNOWN. U.S. pulp magazine founded as a companion to the sf magazine Astounding (refer to HDSFL) in 1939. It published 39 issues before wartime paper shortages killed it in 1943, shortly after its name had been expanded to Unknown Worlds. It developed a highly distinctive character by exploiting the narrative energy derivable from
unashamedly absurd confrontations of sceptical and pragmatic protagonists with magical intrusions or secondary worlds. Such humorous
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fantasies—foreshadowed in the work of Thorne Smith—were brought to a new level of sophistication and considerably broadened in scope by L. Sprague de Camp, sometimes in collaboration with Fletcher Pratt, L. Ron Hubbard, Anthony Boucher, and Henry Kuttner. The method was also employed in such wry contes philosophiques as Robert A.
Heinlein’s “The Devil Makes the Law,” Jack Williamson’s Darker than You Think, and Fritz Leiber’s Conjure Wife. Leiber also published his early sword and sorcery stories in Unknown, while other action-adventure fiction was provided by Hubbard and Norvell W. Page. Unknown thus provided an invaluable laboratory for experimentation with chimerical fantasies, although its example was not extensively followed up until the advent of genre fantasy reignited interest in the 1970s.
URBAN FANTASY. A fantasy with inclusions that carefully transfigure apparatus traditionally associated with rural settings in order to adapt it to modern cities, often redesigning it to fit specific locations. The core of the subgenre consists of contemporary fantasies and 20th-century historical fantasies, although the definition given in the Clute/Grant Encyclopedia also admits stories set in secondary world cities that are intended as archetypes of urban sprawl and urban decay. The development of urban fantasy was pioneered by Fritz Leiber in such stories as
“Smoke Ghost” and “The Girl with the Hungry Eyes,” but the subgenre was given more definitive form in the work of Charles de Lint and such individual items as Mark Helprin’s Winter’s Tale, Megan Lindholm’s The Wizard of the Pigeons, Emma Bull’s The War of the Oaks, Michael Moorcock’s Mother London, Kara Dalkey’s Steel Rose, Richard Bowes’s Minions of the Moon (1999), Tanya Huff’s Gate of Darkness, Gate of Light, Neal Shusterman’s Downsiders (1999), and Paul Brandon’s The Wild Reel (2004).
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VAMPIRE. A supernatural predator that feeds on human blood; humanoid versions are often alleged to arise by means of a method of reproduction in which the victims of vampires are subjected to a form of resurrection after death. The motif is widely featured in horror fiction (refer to HDHL), but the vampire’s status as a monster is dependent on the conviction that resurrection as a vampire is a fate worse than death—a
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conviction that was never entirely safe and was subject to an extraordinarily strident challenge in the fantasy literature of the 1970s.
Literary vampires are derived from two distinct folkloristic traditions; the Greek lamia appeared as a seductive female, whose femme fatale quality always recommended her for use in many erotic fantasies, while Eastern European superstitions regarding cannibalistically inclined reanimated corpses seemed to have no such potential until the notion was usurped by John Polidori in his demonization of Lord Byron as The Vampyre (1819). So powerful was the influence of The Vampyre that Byron’s Gothic image was firmly stamped on subsequent images of male vampires, whose powers and limitations were cobbled together
from Eastern European folklore. The two sources were casually fused by Théophile Gautier’s “Clarimonde,” Paul Féval’s The Vampire Countess, and J. Sheridan le Fanu’s “Carmilla” (1872) before the combination was definitively formularized in Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
Although many subsequent writers of horror fiction strove to confine vampires to monstrous roles, the charismatic qualities derived from Byron and lamias could not be suppressed, and the vampire’s qualified immortality became increasingly unconvincing as a form of eternal damnation. Tentative experiments like Jane Gaskell’s The Shiny Narrow Grin (1964) were followed a decade later by a drastic change of attitude manifest in such flamboyant historical fantasies as Pierre Kast’s The Vampires of Alfama (1975; tr. 1976), Fred Saberhagen’s The Dracula Tape, and Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire, which gave birth to a hybrid species of vampire fiction in which the erotic and horrific elements added spice to exercises in baroque existentialist fantasy. Notable examples of this “revisionist” vampire fantasy include Susan Pe-trey’s Varkela series (1979–83), Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s Saint-Germain series, Suzy McKee Charnas’s The Vampire Tapestry, Geoffrey Farrington’s The Revenants (1983), Barbara Hambly’s Immortal Blood, Storm Constantine’s Burying the Shadow, Poppy Z. Brite’s Lost Souls (1992), Anne Billson’s Suckers (1993), Lucius Shepard’s The Golden, and the various series begun by Nancy Collins’s Sunglasses after Dark (1989), Kim Newman’s Anno Dracula, Freda Warrington’s A Taste of Blood Wine, and—triumphantly completing the circle—Tom Holland’s The Vampyre.
Yarbro and Warrington demonstrated that the new breed of male vam-
pire was not only amenable to recruitment to generic romantic fiction but perfectly adapted to that environment, where he began to flourish in such
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series as those launched by Maggie Shayne’s Twilight Phantasies (1993), Nancy Gideon’s Midnight Kiss (1994), and Christine Feehan’s Dark Prince (1999), and such anthologies as Strangers in the Night (Silhouette, 1995) and After Twilight (LoveSpell, 2001). Despite the implicit eroticism of the motif, it was also adapted to children’s fiction in successful series by Willis Hall and “Darren Shan” (Darren O’Shaughnessy).
A significant variant of the motif is the “psychic vampire” that renews its youth and strength by feeding on the “life force” of others—examples are featured in Jean Lorrain’s “The Egregore,” Sabine Baring-Gould’s “Margery of Quether,” Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Parasite, and George S. Viereck’s The House of the Vampire—but its fashionability waned in the 20th century; blood has far more symbolic force than any mere pseudoelectrical fluid.
VANCE, JACK (1916– ). U.S. writer best known for sf (refer to HDSFL), although he would undoubtedly have written more fantasy had he been able to find magazine markets for the exotic far-futuristic fantasies making up The Dying Earth (1950); they eventually became exemplars as significant as Clark Ashton Smith’s Zothique series. Vance extended the series in the picaresque stories collected in The Eyes of the Over-world (1966) and Cugel’s Saga (1983), and in the conscientiously decadent Morreion (1973; book 1979) and Rhialto the Marvelous (1984); he gave permission for a further extension by Michael Shea. The Last Castle (1967) offers a more carefully hybridized image of the far future.
Vance had earlier imported similar decadent elements into many of
his exotic planetary romances, including Son of the Tree (1951; book 1964), Big Planet (1952; book 1957; restored text 1978), T
he Houses of Iszm (1954; book 1964), and The Dragon Masters (1963); he made a key contribution to the stylistic and ideative sophistication of science fantasy between 1950 and 1980, after which the establishment of genre fantasy reduced the necessity for such compromises. His most significant contribution to genre fantasy thereafter was an exuberantly exotic trilogy set in Lyonesse, comprising Suldrun’s Garden (1983), The Green Pearl (1985), and Madouc (1989). Fantasy stories are included in many of his collections, most notably Eight Fantasms and Magics (1969; abridged as Fantasms and Magics) and Green Magic: The Fantasy Realms of Jack Vance (1979).
VANDERMEER, JEFF (1968– ). U.S. writer and small press publisher. His Ministry of Whimsy Press (founded 1984) issued numerous avant-gardish
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fantasy books and the magazine Jabberwocky. The Book of Frog (1989) and The Book of Lost Places (1996) mingle fantasies with horror stories.
The novella Dradin in Love (1996) launched a striking series of decadent fantasies set in the exotic city of Ambergris; it was collected with others in City of Saints and Madmen: The Book of Ambergris (2001; exp. 2002; further exp. 2004). Other surreal fabulations are included in The Day Dali Died: Poetry and Flash Fiction (2003) and Secret Life (2004). VanderMeer’s anthologies—most notably The Thackeray T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric and Discredited Diseases (2003, coedited with Mark Roberts)—offer further testimony to the range and innovative spirit of his imagination; they include the Leviathan series, coedited with Forrest Aguirre (4 vols., 2001–2004) and Album Zutique 1 (2003).
VANDE VELDE, VIVIAN (1951– ). U.S. writer in various genres whose work for children always displayed a mordant maturity that became increasingly conspicuous over time. Once upon a Test (1984) is a collection of subversively transfigured fairy tales; further examples are assembled in Tales from the Brothers Grimm and the Sisters Weird (1995) and The Rumpelstiltskin Problem (2000). The novel A Hidden Magic (1985) is similar in spirit, as are the timeslip fantasy A Well-Timed Enchantment (1990); User Unfriendly (1991), in which the protagonists are trapped in a game; Dragon’s Bait (1992), whose heroine befriends the dragon to which she is sacrificed; the revisionist vampire story Companions of the Night (1995); and the theriomorphic fantasy The Changeling Prince (1998).
In The Conjurer Princess (1997), a princess apprentices herself to a wizard in order to undertake an Orphean quest. A Coming Evil (1998) is a dark historical fantasy set during World War II. Ghost of a Hanged Man (1998) is a fantasy western. Never Trust a Dead Man (1999), There’s a Dead Person Following My Sister Around (1999), and Magic Can Be Murder (2000) are dark-edged hybrid mysteries. Heir Apparent (2002) is a hectic satirical quest fantasy. The protagonist of Wizard at Work (2003) is heavily stressed by the demands of his clients. More short fiction is collected in Curses, Inc. and Other Stories (1997) and Being Dead (2001).
VAN LUSTBADER, ERIC (1946– ). U.S. writer who dropped the “van”
from his byline in the 1980s, when he specialized in martial-arts
thrillers, but reclaimed it in 2001. The science fantasy The Sunset Warrior (1977) served as a prelude to a trilogy comprising Shallows of Night
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(1978), Dai-San (1978), and Beneath an Opal Moon (1980), which adapted sword and sorcery to an Oriental setting. He returned to more stylized adventures in a similar setting in the Pearl Saga, comprising The Ring of Five Dragons (2001), The Veil of a Thousand Tears (2002), and The Cage of Nine Banestones (2003).
VANSITTART, PETER (1920– ). British writer. His first venture into Arthurian fantasy, Lancelot (1978), minimizes its fantasy component, but Parsifal (1988) allows its hero to survive from the Middle Ages to World War II. In The Death of Robin Hood (1981), another legendary hero becomes an abiding presence through the centuries, into the de-pression of the 1930s. In the far more playful Hermes in Paris (2000), the classical deity takes a holiday at Napoleon III’s court.
VIERECK, GEORGE S. (1884–1962). German-born U.S. journalist whose fiction attempted to import the spirit of the European Decadent movements. The House of the Vampire (1907) is a homoerotic account of psychic vampirism. In the calculatedly scandalous best-selling trilogy of erotic fantasies he wrote in collaboration with Paul Eldridge, comprising My First Two Thousand Years: The Autobiography of the Wandering Jew (1928), Salome, the Wandering Jewess (1930), and The Invincible Adam (1932), the Wandering Jew and his female counterpart are heroic warriors against “the Great God Ennui,” he questing for the ever-elusive secret of “unendurable pleasure indefinitely prolonged,”
she seeking to liberate womankind from the yoke of male domination.
A similar combination of prurience and eccentric feminism features in Gloria (1952), in which the eponymous goddess alleges that the supposedly great lovers of history and legend were all woefully inadequate.
My First Two Thousand Years had the rare distinction of inspiring a parody, The Memoirs of Satan (1932), by William Gerhardi and Brian Lunn, that is of considerable interest in its own right as a witty exercise in literary satanism.
VISIONARY FANTASY. A fantasy presented in the form of a dream that retains some pretence of being a “true” revelation; dream fantasies that do not are here categorized as hallucinatory fantasies. Religious fantasies routinely make the assumption that prophetic and allegorical revelations are often delivered as visionary fantasies, after the fashion of the biblical book of Revelations and much apocryphal literature; the most notable literary recapitulations of the notion include Dante’s Divine Comedy and John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress.
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Less orthodox visionary fantasies aspiring to oracular quality are usually to be found in such fields as spiritualist and theosophical fantasy.
The notion that artists and writers might be blessed with a quasi-
oracular genius was sustained by such examples as Simeon Solomon’s
“A Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep” (1871), Olive Shreiner’s Dreams (1891) and W. B. Yeats’s A Vision, but after the advent of surrealism dreams were more often used as sources of incoherence than vehicles of revelation. The kinds of fantasy most likely to adopt visionary frames thereafter were moralistic fantasies—especially Christmas fantasies modeled on Charles Dickens’s templates—and erotic fantasies slightly ashamed of their own self-indulgence and ponderous satires.
VIVIAN, E. CHARLES (1882–1947). Pseudonym of British editor and writer Charles Henry Cannell. He published a few fantasy stories in Flying while he was its editor in 1917–18, sometimes using the byline “A.
K. Walton,” and produced similar works in the 1920s when he worked on early British pulp magazines. The fantasy novels he wrote as Vivian are mostly lost-race stories, some of which—notably City of Wonder (1922)—have elements of theosophical fantasy. Fields of Sleep (1923) features a remnant of the Babylonian empire in bondage to addictive scent, while its sequel People of the Darkness (1924) features an underworld inhabited by nonhuman descendants of an Atlantean race.
The Lady of the Terraces (1925) features survivors of a pre-Incan civilization, whose heyday is described in A King There Was (1926).
Cannell also introduced fantastic elements into some volumes of a
series of detective stories that he wrote as “Jack Mann.” Grey Shapes (1937) features theriomorphic relics of an ancient race whose memory is preserved in the Celtic mythology of the Sidhe, a secret history further extrapolated in Nightmare Farm (1937)—which borrows its key motif from City of Wonder— Maker of Shadows (1938), The Ninth Life (1939), Her Ways Are Death (1939), and The Glass Too Many (1940).
VOLSKY, PAULA (?– ). U.S. writer. The Curse of the Witch-Queen (1982) is a humorous fantasy. The secondary world featured in the trilogy comprising The Sorcerer’s Lady (1986), The Sorcerer’s Heir (1988), and The Sorcerer’s Curse (1989) is modeled on 17th-century Venice. The Luck of Relian Kru (1987) is a comedy featuring a series of
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quests. Illusion (1991) is a story of thinning featuring an alternative French Revolution. The Wolf of Winter (1993) is a dark fantasy whose plot recalls Shakespeare’s Macbeth. The Gates of Twilight (1996) is set in an alternative world where the end of the British raj is confused by the real existence of the Hindu gods; its sequel, The Grand Ellipse (2000), features an around-the-world race. The White Tribunal (1997) is an offbeat Faustian revenge fantasy.
VOLTAIRE (1694–1778). Pseudonym of French historian and philosopher François-Marie Arouet, one of the leading intellectuals of the 18th century. He invented and popularized the conte philosophique, some of whose early examples employed tales modeled on those in Antoine Galland’s Arabian Nights as vehicles for rationalistic rhetoric. The protagonist of “The World as It Is” (1746) is conducted on an educational tour by the angel Ituriel. “Zadig, or Destiny” (1748), the prototype of all tales of deductive detection, employs an angel as a deus ex machina.
“Memnon, or Wisdom” (1747) and “Barabec and the Fakirs” (1750) are similar, but the fantasy element was minimized in subsequent endeavors until Voltaire began to produce more playful tales, including “The Princess of Babylon” (1768), in which the heroine travels the world in search of her lost love under the guidance of a sarcastic phoenix, and the biblical fantasy “The White Bull” (1774). Voltaire’s contes philosophiques were enormously influential, their form and method being adopted into numerous moralistic tales, sceptical allegories, and social satires. He demonstrated conclusively that fantasy, far from constituting an insult to rationality, might be a uniquely useful instrument of thought in an Age of Reason.
VORNHOLT, JOHN (1951– ). U.S. writer. In the trilogy comprising The Troll King (2002), The Troll Queen (2003), and The Troll Treasure (2003), trolls in servitude to ogres attempt to bridge the Great Chasm that separates them from the land of the elves, in the hope of facilitating their liberation. The Fabulist (1993) is a fanciful biography of Aesop.
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