Literary Wonderlands

by Laura Miller

  When her friend Roger goes missing, she is at first comforted by the appearance of the charming Mrs. Coulter—that is, until Lyra discovers that Mrs. Coulter may be complicit in her friend’s kidnapping. With the aid of the alethiometer, her golden compass, Lyra sets out in search for him. And as she journeys to the wildness of the North, she discovers that hers may not be the only world there is. Place is inherently tied to knowledge in this series. The witches who live in the north of Lyra’s world do so because the veil between worlds is thin and their knowledge comes from this proximity. Place is also inherently tied to perspective: “Is this a new world?” one character asks, and is answered, “Not to those born in it.” Things look different, depending on where they are seen.

  The Subtle Knife (1997) begins in our world, but protagonist Will Parry soon discovers a portal to the world of Cittàgazze. Here he meets Lyra, and becomes the guardian of the subtle knife—the blade that can cut doors through universes. Yet travel between worlds is not without consequences. Each opening causes the loss of Dust, a significant elementary particle. The Church in Lyra’s world sees Dust, and the knowledge that accompanies it, as a manifestation of original sin, and wishes to destroy it. But Dust, like knowledge, is necessary.

  In The Amber Spyglass (2000), yet more worlds are explored. From the land of the dead to that of the elephantine mulefa, Lyra is forced to make her fated choice. But once Lyra’s choice is made, the doors between the worlds must be closed—never to be opened again.

  GEORGE R. R. MARTIN

  A GAME OF THRONES (1996)

  In the world of the Seven Kingdoms, diverse characters play the “game of thrones,” a fantastic War of the Roses that can have only one victor.

  George R. R. Martin (b.1948), dubbed by many the “American Tolkien,” published A Game of Thrones in 1996, during a difficult interval for fantasy literature, which was, at the time, struggling to keep up with the wise-cracking chutzpah of urban-fantasy stories. A Game of Thrones emerged as a link between worlds, with all the black humor and quick wit of urban fantasy, combined with the scale and drama of an epic story heavily influenced by medieval history. This heady blend of tradition and modernity made the Song of Ice and Fire series a publishing phenomenon that has been translated into over forty-five languages and spawned a hit television spin-off.

  A Game of Thrones focuses on the Lord Eddard (“Ned”) Stark and his family, Northern outsiders, whose aversion to politics make them essential to the reader’s point of view. The novel begins, seductively, with a scene of dark magic that the reader then doubts for the next 600 pages. What were the “Others?” How did they connect to the politics of the Seven Kingdoms, and what was the true focus of this multi-perspective story? What makes the novel so compelling is often what it leaves unsaid.

  Martin’s first novel divides the story geographically across the “Seven Kingdoms:” from the frozen north and Winterfell, home of the Starks, to the seat of the Iron Throne in King’s Landing and the grasslands of Essos. The latter is where Daenerys, another central character and one of the last remaining members of the noble house of Targaryen, comes of age among the Dothraki warriors. Martin’s focus here on an adolescent girl—destined to become the powerful “Mother of Dragons”—marks a distinct change from the genre’s frequent interest in young male protagonists. He is working in territory that was previously staked out by feminist fantasy authors such as Mercedes Lackey and Tanya Huff, who also produced epic worlds.

  Part of the adventure of reading A Game of Thrones lies in the way that Martin links place with perspective. Ned Stark’s thoughts are always on ice and snow, his son Bran longs for the sky, and Daenerys is tempered by the heat of Essos. Ever since Tolkien added runic clues to his map in The Hobbit, cartography has always been essential to the genre. Nowhere is this more apparent than in A Game of Thrones, where ancient families, political factions, and indigenous communities battle for control of overlapping territories. Along with heraldry, mapping is the chief cultural element of the Middle Ages that Martin draws upon in his creation of a mixed feudal society. Rather than romanticizing these systems, A Game of Thrones sets out to expose the violence and corruption that underpin them.

  Readers are offered glimpses of this dangerous, breathing world through a number of competing perspectives, often separated by culture and geography. Our understanding of the epic map is always incomplete. Canadian fantasy writer Guy Gavriel Kay used the same technique in his Fionavar trilogy, and Martin adapts this to a truly massive world. Communities whose fate depends upon mapping—such as the Wildings, on the other side of the Wall—are often those who resist such colonial practices. Martin has cited Hadrian’s Wall as an influence for his 300-mile-long, 700-foot-tall “border,” but critics such as Michail Zontos have also described it as a metaphor for the American frontier. Your perspective depends upon which side you end up on, and who draws the map around you. The diverse regions of Westeros are accompanied by living languages, developed in meticulous detail by linguist and conlanger David J. Peterson. His Dothraki language (which you can now take a course on) emerged from only a few words and phrases that Martin had created. What began with Tolkien’s working Elvish language—immortal words—has culminated in a series of languages, even dialects, adopted by a range of cultures.

  A Game of Thrones begins as an enclosed, Gothic tale, then explodes outward along with the Stark family, taking advantage of its fantastic cartography. Like a darker version of the Pevensies, the Stark children grapple with a hostile landscape, whose dangers and inequalities mirror the structures of late feudalism. Magic remains within the space of the uncanny, always an undertone, while economics and the politics of lineage are the monstrous forces that keep everything turning. Bards are destitute, princesses are pawns, and the maesters, like Jon Snow, “know nothing.” Sometimes this ignores the dazzling beauty that was also present during the Middle Ages—the painting, lapidary, verse, and celestial music—but Martin’s focus on tragedy reminds us that this is not Disney’s Middle Ages. He presents a diverse cast of characters: female translators, disabled boys, sly eunuchs, and queer knights. These people set up camp in our brain, because they err, desire, betray, regret.

  Much of the appeal of A Game of Thrones has arisen from the idea that it isn’t a fantasy novel—that it is a more realistic, adult version of a medieval romance. In fact, the opposite is true: A Game of Thrones is every inch a fantasy novel, as proven by its imaginative terrain and speculative understanding of magic. The best fantasy novels are full of ambivalent characters, fallible humans (and others), negotiating a world whose powers and origins they can never fully comprehend. The dwarf Tyrion, whose mind is his sword, has an ancestor in David and Leigh Eddings’s character of Beldin. Martin has also cited the historical fiction of Maurice Druon as a significant influence, and the personalities in Druon’s The Accursed Kings series exemplify the paradoxes of the medieval world. They are also trying to understand a wild space whose edges remain unmapped.

  Critics often describe loving the series in spite of its dragons, but readers and fans alike know perfectly well that dragons are as old as storytelling itself. Rather than revitalizing a genre for a new audience, A Game of Thrones has shown us what fantasy was always capable of, from King Arthur to the Iron Throne.

  DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

  INFINITE JEST (1996)

  Popular entertainment dominates in David Foster Wallace’s immense and complex vision of a future North America, the setting for a story that encompasses addiction, the power of advertising, and tennis.

  In the opening scene of Infinite Jest, Harold James Incandenza—a competitive teenage tennis player, known as “Hal”—reflects that there’s a very good chance that if he makes the finals of the WhataBurger Southwest Junior Invitational tennis tournament on Sunday he’ll get to play in front of Venus Williams.

  There’s nothing particularly surprising about this. It’s an average, ordinary scrap of novelistic detail. Why wouldn’t Venus Williams be
there? And why wouldn’t he want to play in front of her? Except that when David Foster Wallace’s (1962–2008) astounding work was published in 1996, Williams was only fifteen. She hadn’t even played in her first Grand Slam tournament yet. Wallace’s casual name-dropping is a bold piece of near-future prognostication, one that marks, or marked, Infinite Jest as what it is—a work of science fiction. Though, like all works of art set in the future, it is fated, over time, to become an alternate present instead.

  The exact year in which the events of Infinite Jest take place is famously hard to pin down. It has been persuasively argued, based on a few carefully gleaned details, that much of the book takes place in 2009, but in the world of Infinite Jest years are no longer identified by numbers. The narrative is set in the era of what Wallace calls “subsidized time,” in which, every year, a corporation pays to have that year named after one of its products. So among the dates that figure in the timeline of Infinite Jest are the Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar, the Year of the Whisper-Quiet Maytag Dishmaster, and most prominently (you can almost feel Wallace’s glee as he types) the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment.

  Infinite Jest isn’t known primarily as a work of science fiction, of course. It’s better known for its extravagant, ungovernable size—1,088 pages in paperback, counting endnotes—and its enormous literary complexity, which together have turned it into the kind of cult object that young men and women with heavy black spectacles lecture about at cocktail parties: a literary shillelagh for beating one’s intellectual rivals into submission. It presents interpretive challenges as serious as James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), and it has spawned a legion of academic papers, guides, commentaries, spreadsheets, diagrams, and wikis. But the world it takes place in is not our world. Infinite Jest is science fiction, just well-scrubbed of any trace of science fiction’s pulpy roots. Wallace came to science fiction as a crossover artist from literary fiction, working in the high-art tradition of Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo.

  But there was something about writing in other worlds that Wallace felt made it easier to get at our own. He liked things to be just slightly askew. His first novel, The Broom of the System, was published in 1987, but it’s set in 1990. By that time, part of Ohio has been turned into a man-made topographical feature called the Great Ohio Desert. It’s meant, apparently, as an immense work of art, “a point of savage reference for the good people of Ohio. A place to fear and love.” (It’s mostly referred to by its acronym: the G.O.D.)

  Wallace wasn’t a realist, but he wasn’t interested in predicting the future either. He didn’t think there would actually be a Great Ohio Desert, in 1990 or ever. He wasn’t a world-builder, like J. R. R. Tolkien or Frank Herbert, and he didn’t need his fictional otherworlds to be plausible. Rather, time functioned for him as a solvent, a way of making reality more malleable, so that he could manipulate it and exaggerate it to express the things he wanted to express. Wallace’s science fiction is a form of satire—the future is a place to play in, where he can pull aside the veil and reveal the true nature of things. It’s a trick learned from those roots in DeLillo and Pynchon, whose works are veined with science-fictional tropes and plotlines. The Airborne Toxic Event of DeLillo’s White Noise (1985), for example, wouldn’t have looked out of place in Infinite Jest.

  Infinite Jest has two protagonists. One is Hal, the aforementioned prodigiously intelligent seventeen-year-old who attends the Enfield Tennis Academy. The other is Don Gately, a recovering Demerol addict and reformed burglar who works at a rehabilitation clinic called Ennet House, located near the tennis academy.

  Before he died, Hal’s father James, who founded the tennis academy, was the patriarch of a family of eccentric prodigies reminiscent of the Glass family in J. D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey (1961). James Incandenza, commonly known merely as Himself, was also an avid amateur filmmaker, and he created a film so addictively entertaining that anyone watching it becomes paralyzed and can pay attention to nothing else, to the point where he or she lapses irredeemably into catatonia. “Whoever saw it,” Wallace writes, “wanted nothing else ever in life but to see it again, and then again, and so on.” It’s like the Monty Python sketch about a joke so funny that everyone who hears it dies from laughing. Before the book begins, Himself has committed suicide by sticking his head in a microwave oven.

  Wallace wrote Infinite Jest just before the Internet came into its own as a mainstream entertainment medium and, as a result, its world is endowed with Wallace’s own homegrown version of an electronic global entertainment network, InterLace. It’s more or less a video-on-demand system. People use teleputers, or TPs, to access it, and films are stored on cartridges, not tapes or disks. These inventions weren’t just playful whims to Wallace. They exemplified the enormous existential challenges that technology now presents to all of us. “Today’s person spends way more time in front of screens,” he once told the writer David Lipsky. “In fluorescent-lit rooms, in cubicles, being on one end or the other of an electronic data transfer. And what is it to be human and alive and exercise your humanity in that kind of exchange?”

  The world of Infinite Jest has its own distinctive geopolitics as well. Under the leadership of its president, a former Las Vegas entertainer, usually referred to by Wallace as “Johnny Gentle, Famous Crooner,” the U.S. has merged with Mexico and Canada to form a megastate called the Organization of North American Nations. (Again, check the acronym, with its sly wink to the Bible and masturbation shame: O.N.A.N. More glee.) A large part of New England has been partitioned and written off as a massive toxic waste repository known as the “Great Concavity” (it’s a spiritual descendant of the G.O.D. from The Broom of the System). Radioactivity from the Great Concavity has given rise to terrifying herds of feral hamsters that scour the Earth, leaving the land behind them bare of all vegetal matter.

  This unstable arrangement provides the mechanism for the plot of Infinite Jest, to the extent that it has one. The Great Concavity runs along the border of Quebec and, inevitably, pollutants and toxins leach across the border, not to mention feral hamsters. Radical cells of Quebecois separatists oppose the Great Concavity (which they insist on referring to, by Wallacian logic, as the Great Convexity) and, by extension, O.N.A.N. as well, and they’ll stop short of nothing, even terrorism, to make their opposition felt. Their weapon of choice? The fatally entertaining film created by James Incandenza, which they spend much of the book trying to get hold of. The film is called, of course, Infinite Jest.

  Infinite Jest, the novel, is an example of literary maximalism, one of the dominant fictional modes of the 1990s; other examples include DeLillo’s Underworld (1997) and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000). As in those works, there’s a sense that Wallace is trying to import the multicolored, multilayered fabric of an entire world into his novel intact, leaving nothing out. Not unlike those of Underworld and White Teeth, the world he’s trying to import is one that he’s also creating at the same time, detail by detail, hamster by hamster. Writing the book was a gargantuan task. “I’ve never done something where I’ve just had to hold so many discrete pieces of information in my head at one time,” he told Lipsky. “You ever see Johnny Mnemonic? I mean, he gets this sort of data overload, and his ears bleed.” It would have been easier, of course, in some ways, to describe the world as it is. Certainly Wallace was up to the task: He was a first-class journalist and essayist as well as a novelist. But, at the time when he wrote Infinite Jest, Wallace considered realism to be all but bankrupt, and useless for what he was trying to do. Realism was too easy and familiar for the reader—not shocking enough. He wanted to jolt people out of their comfort zones, so they could make contact with real feelings and raw emotions, and see the world as it is. To do that, he paradoxically had to put them in an unreal world.

  Having suffered from clinical depression for decades, Wallace committed suicide in 2008, leaving behind his fiction of another world to help the rest of us survive this one. “Look man,” Wallace once told an interviewer, �
��we’d probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is? In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what’s human and magical that still live and glow, despite the times’ darkness.”

  J. K. ROWLING

  HARRY POTTER AND THE PHILOSOPHER’S STONE (1997)

  Orphaned, unwanted Harry Potter realizes his magical powers at Hogwarts School while battling the evil wizard Voldemort, who seeks the life-giving Philosopher’s Stone.

  Harry Potter hardly needs an introduction. The series has sold more than 450 million copies worldwide and has been translated into more than seventy languages. Moreover, the world of Harry Potter extends far beyond the books themselves. The blockbuster adaptations are the second highest-grossing film series of all time, and Harry Potter pervades popular culture. From video games to board games, from fan fiction to fan sites, the Harry Potter world and characters have been used and discussed again and again. When J. K. Rowling (b.1965) wrote Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone in 1997 (published in the U.S. as Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone), she sparked one of the greatest and largest fandoms in history.

  Perhaps the greatest appeal of the Wizarding World is that it is one both familiar and unfamiliar. Our world is translated into another, parallel world, which operated on rules sometimes similar, sometimes different. Rowling’s creation expands through the seven books to reference wizards in different parts of continental Europe (and the world, in the afterlife of the Harry Potter fandom universe). However, a global presence is not necessary to be transported to a mirror image of our own universe made magical: the place is suburban England; travel is on English trains; schools have classrooms and dormitories. The familiarity of each of these locations is made fresh—sometimes strange—as the reader delights in the intersection—sometimes collision—of the wizarding and Muggle (non-wizarding) existences. The word “utopia” does not quite apply here, but neither is this the “dystopia” popular in contemporary fiction. The neologism “contopia” might suit this world alongside our own, sometimes even within our own, but still functioning successfully on its own. As Hagrid explains to Harry, wizards keep their world secret because “everyone’d be wantin’ magic solutions to their problems. Nah, we’re best left alone.”