Today's ponderable

[swan_tower]

I'd like to talk about portal fantasies. Or rather, I'd like you to talk about them.

By that term, I mean the stories where people from this world go into another, more fantastical world. Narnia, for example. Once upon a time, these seem to have been more popular; now, not so much. And if I had to guess, I'd say that's at least in part because of the way a lot of them were transparent wish-fulfillment: Protagonist (who is an emotional stand-in for the author, though only in egregious cases a Mary Sue) goes to Magical Land where things are more colorful and interesting than in the real world. And maybe they stay there, maybe they don't.

Talk to me about the portal fantasies you've read. Which ones stick in your mind? What was your response to them, both as a kid and now? Which ones did the wish-fulfillment thing extra transparently, and how so?

(Yes, I actually have a special interest in the bad examples of this genre. In fact, if you approach this entire question as an academic curiosity of the structural sort paired with a authorly eye toward writing a deconstruction -- not a parody -- of the tropes, you'll be on the right track.)

Portal fantasies. Talk to me about 'em. Good, bad, ugly, laughably naive. What's your take?

Comments

[drydem.livejournal.com]

Erfworld(on the Giant in the Playground site) does a very interesting portal fantasy humor comic.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I didn't get into that one, but I also tried to read it as it started up, which meant I couldn't devour a block of it in a sitting; I might like it better now.

[j-cheney.livejournal.com]

Martha Wells wrote a trilogy called "The Fall of Ile-Rien", excellent books all of them. This would be what I would classify as a 'good' example because the world jumping wasn't wish-fulfillment, it was part of a war.

As for the bad and the ugly, yep, I've read them. I think it's better not to name names. But I still have a copy of one because it's incredibly funny read aloud--and the improbably-named heroine might as well have been named Mary Sue.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

But I'd love for you to name names! If not here, then could you e-mail the info to me? Marie dot brennan at gmail dot com.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

pameladean's Secret Country trilogy and Guy Gavriel Kay's Fionavar Tapestry. Love.

I know there are bad, ugly, and laughably naive ones out there. But I try to dodge them just as I dodge bad high fantasy, and oh, I love the good ones.

I have two volumes of one written myself (and trunked) and at least one more completely different one that occasionally nags at the back of my head.

[janni.livejournal.com]

The Secret Country books are among my all-time favorites.

My main requirement is that the characters don't forget everything when they return home--that always made me want to throw the book across the room, because what's the point of the adventure if you don't get to remember it?

Tried to write one once, with mixed success that had more to do with my writing at the time than the genre--though it's being a hard-sell genre right now makes me a little leerier of going back to it than it might be otherwise.

[xmurphyjacobsx.livejournal.com]

Two pop to mind, neither in particular "good". David Brin wrote "The Practice Effect" which was more or less an update with twists on Twain's "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" (which also might count). Ursula Le Guin wrote one called "The Beginning Place" which had an ending I hated so much I threw the book. I swear, I think someone cut out the last chapter. I haven't read them, but isn't Guy Gavriel Kay's Fionnavar Tapestry basically this kind of fantasy?

I rather like the idea of the portal fantasy, mostly because I like fish out of water stories. Beyond that, yeah, they can be just plain bad because they are SO easily perverted into writer masturbation fantasies (fun to write, and to perhaps share with those 3 friends who like that sort of thing but don't write, but not suitable for public view).

Beyond that, I don't know that I've thought about them.

Edit: Andre Norton -- Here Abide Monsters. That was one I remember liking VERY much, but I haven't read it in so long that I can't recall why.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Makes me wonder if you could connect portal fantasies in certain ways to Cinderella-ish fantasies -- the kinds of stories where a lower-class character gets swept up into high society for some contrived reason.

But to do stories of one culture to an entirely foreign one, and to do it entirely within a secondary world, you'd have to build two convincing cultures and get the reader to identify with one of them as the baseline, which is hard.

[mllelaurel.livejournal.com]

I remember a specific subgenre of those: roleplayers get sucked into their own game. Sometimes the GM was complicit, and sometimes he/she wasn't. I don't know if the idea started with the Dungeons and Dragons cartoon, but judging by the dates on some of these books, it really took off in the eighties.

From what I recall it was less about wish fulfillment and more about the characters thinking that's what it would be and having that belief bite them in the ass because the world they were in was darker than they bargained for.

I'm sure some were wish fulfillment. They're just not the ones that come to mind now.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

From what I recall it was less about wish fulfillment and more about the characters thinking that's what it would be and having that belief bite them in the ass because the world they were in was darker than they bargained for.

That too -- I suspect it might be a distinct sub-type of the trope, just as Mary Sues have their mirror-image, the Anti-Sue.

[difrancis.livejournal.com]

I always like the Rosemary Edgehill 12 treasures books, but more for the academic nerdi-ism than the portal stuff. I do like Wen Spencer's Tinker series--I think it does the portal thing well. And while I liked the Andre Norton Witch World stuff, I did not like the crossover spill of worlds or the portal part--I like the witch world part of the books. I also like the Amber series, which is a version of the portal story.

It seems in the ones that I like, that there was a reason for the portal or that there was story that dealt with the portal in a way that it just wasn't the convenient macguffin that allows a passage but other than that has no life ramifications for anybody.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

It seems in the ones that I like, that there was a reason for the portal or that there was story that dealt with the portal in a way that it just wasn't the convenient macguffin that allows a passage but other than that has no life ramifications for anybody.

That's a good point. And, in point of fact, one of the handwavium bits from when I was twelve that I've never satisfactorily renovated. (This idea's been with me a long time, and needs a lot of work.)

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

The recent example, sort of, is Charlie Stross' Merchant Princes series -- though it isn't particularly fantasy, apart from the device that achieves the transport between Earth and the various parallel Earths (and back again). It definitely isn't wish fulfillment -- the main thrust of the series is exploring how economic development is affected by the contact between the (at last check) three parallel worlds.

Zelazny's Amber books might be classed as portal fantasy, of a sort. And I'm sure that Andre Norton had at least one SF-ish portal fantasy, wherein the magic McGuffin is the Siege Perilous, which transports anyone sitting in it to the world they properly belong to. Can't remember the name of the book, though.

Are Jasper Forde's literary detective mysteries portal fantasies? It seems like being able to literally step into the pages of fiction is a particular subgenre of portal fiction, another example of which, in its way, is Heinlein's Number of the Beast.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Sadly, I don't love economics and business enough to really warm to the Merchant Princes, though I think they're good books.

You're probably right about Fforde, as a particular sub-type. Which then raises the fascinating possibility that those books are close cousins to that great horror of fanfiction, the story in which a person from our world gets to go run around in the narrative of Harry Potter or wherever . . . .

[dsgood.livejournal.com]

Are there stories in which ours is the wish-fulfillment world for characters from elsewhere?

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

The proximate cause for my brain chewing on this was jimhines' review of sartorias' Once a Princess, which begins with secondary-world characters having taken refuge in ours. I can't think of others at the moment, though.

[janni.livejournal.com]

It seems I've seen more small press than large press portal fantasies the past few years, though of course titles are now eluding me ... but I seem to recall that being true the year I was on the Norton jury, too.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

They might be making a comeback. Harry Potter's all but a portal fantasy, imho, given the way the wizarding world gets divided off.

[snickelish.livejournal.com]

I'm rather fond of Stephen Lawhead's Song of Albion Celtic trilogy, partly because I love that the protag has to actually learn the language. It seems to me that a lot of portal fantasies (nice phrase!) gloss over all the difficulties inherent in getting dropped into a completely different world. I mean, think about how much trouble I'd have if I suddenly found myself in rural China - food, hygiene, appropriate clothing and manners... Most portal travelers just have too easy.

OTOH, sometimes there's a reason given for why the cultures are as close as they are, such as in Narnia (in which the answer seems to be "God did it," which I'm fine with given the context).

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

The phrase is not original to me.

You're right about the easiness of the transition -- it seems to me that in a lot of cases (she said vaguely, not actually coming up with examples at the moment) the protagonist's difficulties are played romantically rather than realistically. Oh, it's so charming she made that mistake, or lookit how enlightened she is with her hand-washing or feminism compared to those around her, or she does something wrong that results in a meet-cute with her love interest.

(My brain has apparently decided these protagonists are all female? I blame Mary Sue. Though I seem to remember reading some books a dog's age ago that had a male character go through a portal. Maybe something by Salvatore?)

[carbonel]

Portal fantasies (nice term) have always a been favorite type of story for me. I think it's the familiar character with the unfamiliar world that appeals, or something.

Barbara Hambly's Time of the Dark trilogy was one. I'm not sure what was wrong with it, but it never really jelled for me.

I loved Joy Chant's Red Moon and Black Mountain.

I think the first one I ever read was Andre Norton's Gray Magic aka Steel Magic. That one didn't hold up terribly well on rereading, but I loved it when I first read it at age eight or nine.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I should edit the post to say the phrase isn't mine, so I don't keep re-typing it. :-)

I think what appeals with these books is the way they allow you to imagine how you would react in those circumstances. Which is a trait they share with certain kinds of urban fantasy, or zombie apocalypses.

What didn't hold up well for you with the Norton? General craft stuff like plot, or something specific to the portal aspect?

[tiamat360.livejournal.com]

I've always thought of the first Harry Potter book as a "portal fantasy."

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I think the whole series is mostly a portal-style setup, though it does start bringing the two worlds closer together later on.

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

Hello, I'm Kari (Sperring), new on your f'list: fan and academic.
When I was 8 or 9 I came across a book called The Unicorn Window by Lynette Muir, a British writer who published only a handful of books, for all children. It was Elidor without the hopelessness; Joan Aiken with extra Mark-and-Harriet. The story follows a brother and sister who break a window in a relative's house and find themselves trapped in an alternate world where they must recapture the unicorn they themselves have set free. It charmed me completely, and still does, even though I am now way too old for it. It's my favourite portal fantasy, I think -- the only other one that had the same impact on me at that sort of age as The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe.
And yet I don't really care for many adult portal fantasies. They never ring true, somehow: their protagonists annoy me and seem always to be somehow patronising the worlds they arrive in. I'm not comfortable in worlds which can only survive through the intervention of magical outsiders. It's too colonial, perhaps even too American for me (I'm British -- technically mostly Welsh, indeed). The imported character -- meant to be my eyes on this new world -- becomes a barrier I resent. Adults, somehow, don't fit in the Otherworld (and that I learnt from C S Lewis, from Uncle Andrew's discomfort in the World Between the Worlds).
edited for typos.

[snickelish.livejournal.com]

I think I agree with your YA/adult divide - a lot of things that bother me in 'adult' portal fantasies are just part of the game in children's versions. I still like the children's fantasy worlds to be consistent and make sense and all those things, but I'll accept conveniences there if there hand-waved prettily enough that I won't accept in adult fantasies.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

I loved them when I was a kid--as long as the memory of the experience wasn't taken away on the kids' return. But by age nine or so, I hated the return. I wanted the kids to stay.

I also started to hate the "You are the only hope of this world" stories.

Finally I realized what I liked was comparisons of cultures.

I loved Narnia as a kid, and there was an odd one called A Walk Out of the World. I think the last one I really loved was Joy Chant's, which came out when I was nineteen.

[snickelish.livejournal.com]

and there was an odd one called A Walk Out of the World.

Yeah, I remember that one! An immortal family of women with silver hair, and so on.

[kleenestar.livejournal.com]

Read recently (in the last few years):

Mirror of her Dreams series by Donaldson - less eye-pokey than Covenant by a long shot, and actually does some deconstructing of its own so it might be useful to you. Very "So, we called for a hero from another world and we got ... you???"

The Magicians by Lev Grossman - I don't think it's out yet but I have an ARC I can send you if you need it. (Once it comes out, I think portal fantasy is about to hit the mainstream again in a big way.) The premise is basically, "What if some really awful, shitty people were the ones who got to do the portal fantasy?" Though what squicked me is that the author doesn't seem to realize that his characters are generally terrible human beings.

War of the Flowers by Tad Williams - Of the "Whoa, I'm a lame slacker dude in the real world, but my guitar playing / artistic dreams / misogyny make me AWESOME IN FANTASY LAND" sub-genre, but redeemed by a completely awesome take on the Other World (and by Williams' general awesomeness - the genre lameness really isn't his fault).

Wonderful portal stuff in His Dark Materials, but you can't really go wrong with Pullman as far as I'm concerned so I might be biased. :)

And of course there's the de Lint-influenced crowd (UnLunDun, Neverwhere) which mostly appeal to me because of how they reimagine our mundane world as a magical place.

Obsessed with as a kid:

Apprentice Adept series by Piers Anthony - A guy from a sci-fi culture ends up in a fantasy world where magic works, and ends up traveling back and forth often enough to earn himself some serious frequent flier miles.

(Plus some of the other stuff people have already mentioned - like Narnia which I freaking LOVED. I spent a lot of time rummaging in other people's closets, just in case.)

If you're really looking for bad portal stuff, you might want to check out the romance aisle. I couldn't name names, because I mostly skim them in the bookstore, but there's definitely a fair few that do the "I'm in a magic land and EVERYONE LOVES ME" thing. Or also the past.

Also:

You should email Ben Lehman about Land of a Thousand Kings, as I think he did fairly extensive research into this genre when he wrote the game.

I know there are more, but I'll post as I think of them.

[snickelish.livejournal.com]

It occurs to me that it might be an interesting exercise to compare "one of us visits another world" stories with "one of them visits our world" stories. The one that comes immediately to mind is Alexander Key's children's novel, The Forgotten Door. The boy who stumbles here ends up spreading peace and love to us fractious Earthlings - a contrast with us visiting other worlds and taking them hygiene.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

Day the Earth Stood Still. Stranger in a Strange Land.

Portal science-fiction

[deepstarrysky.livejournal.com]

I think Alan E. Nourse's "The Universe Between" could be called portal science fiction. It has a child traveling back and forth between worlds, but none of the wish-fulfillment I associate even with good portal fantasy. It also has our world be the "other" world, as someone asked about in comments.

Re: Portal science-fiction

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

So it shows our world from the perspective of the outsider?

[scottakennedy.livejournal.com]

I think portal books start for me Frank L. Baum and Edgar Rice Burroughs. I've actually never read the Oz books and so can't comment on them.

But as for Burroughs: In the Mars Series, John Carter is mysteriously transported to Mars.
The Pellucidar and Caspak books utilize machines as the portal mechanism (a drill, a sub, a plane), and I can't at the moment recall the portal device used for the Carson of Venus books. I read most of these books when I was thirteen. Without the benefit of a reread to refresh their strengths and weaknesses, I would guess (after 30 some years) their strength to be the swashbuckling adventure and the worldbuilding in Mars and Caspak especially, and their weakness to be that the hero becomes tanned, muscled, and beloved of princesses every time! But when you're a 13-year old boy, that was pretty much the book I wanted to read. I was a painfully shy adolescent, and I think portal books offer a world that demands engagement by the protoganist. Hence, I could fulfill the wish of engagement and competence in dealing with the world even as I escaped from the real world and spoke to no one. I also imagine I would now see a great deal of white male privilege embedded within the Burroughs books as well.

H.G. Well's The Time Machine feels more to me like a portal book than a time travel one.

When I read Gene Wolfe's The Knight and The Wizard, it felt to me like he was taking an almost Burroughs-like portal device and then turning the wish-fulfillment into a series of moral quandaries, wherein the hero's successes trouble even as they comfort or titillate. Those books sort of lodged in my like a burr that meditates upon Good and Evil.

Perhaps such devices lend themselves naturally to religious allegory, as Madeline L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time books comes to mind as a well, although I read that as an adult (as a kid I couldn't finish it). As an adult the religion was just too heavy handed for me as well. Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials fall into this category as well, especially for the main character of A Subtle Knife. Though by the end of the third book, I found the need to create a atheist-allegory just as distracting as a religious one would have been.

The other series mentioned also come to mind (Narnia, Amber, Covenant, Fionavar).

I think the essential quality of portal books is simply escape, which is why books wherein the escape is killed or the real world found to be better are so deeply unsatisfying. If I wanted to know how great the real world is, I wouldn't be reading a portal book to begin with.

I assume we're excluding urban fantasy such as Neverwhere, wherein the two worlds sometimes overlap. Otherwise such recent books as The Raw Shark Texts could be classed as portal deconstruction, wherein the portal is simply a manifestation of mental illness.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

John Carter makes me think of the Gor books. :p

Lewis Carroll.

Sandman's "A Game of You" was portally, with explicit pokes at princess fantasies.

[oddsboy.livejournal.com]

o.0

*reads further*

Ohhhhhhhh, fantasies about magical transportation. Y'see, an here I thought you were soliciting for fan fic with doors or less seemly things...

-Crow

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

You would.

[moonandserpent.livejournal.com]

One notorious example that I haven't seen reference to on here is Joel Rosenberg's Guardians of the Flame series which is a classic of the D&D players go to a fantasy world, type. It's also interesting in that it's grim-n-gritty wish fulfillment. You get the sense that even though the characters are going through hell, that Rosenberg still really wishes this would have happened to his D&D game.

Also Rick Cook's The Wiz Biz where a computer programmer ends up in a fantasy world only to learn that magic there is a LOT like C++. It's played mostly for laughs and wins points for what happens when said programmer brings through his hardcore SCA buddies for help... only for the SCAdian weaponmasters to all get soundly trounced by the real weapons trainers of that world.

TV-wise, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention (the original) Life on Mars. LoM was about a modern cop who ended up taken to a 1970's past that may or may not have been a secondary world, the past, or a delusion. Notable (aside for being awesome) for having the process of the character trying to decide if it was wish-fulfillment or not.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Somebody mentioned Rosenberg upthread, but this has grown like kudzu and I can't even catch up with replies, let spare the time to search it out. :-)

[akashiver.livejournal.com]

Katz's The Third Magic was an interesting one, I remember. The Publisher's Weekly description spoils an unnecessary amount of the plot - I seem to recall being a decent way into the book before I realized that the alien portal world was Arthurian, and much, much further before I realized the degree to which Katz was inverting the typical Mary Sue paradigm.
The line "Poor Mordred. It's not really your fault either, is it?" (or words to that effect) still strikes me as a brilliantly chilling next-to-concluding sentence.

But bad wish fulfillment fantasies? I can't recall that many of them, to be honest. I think I just closed a lot of books that bored me.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I think I just closed a lot of books that bored me.

I do that too, nowadays, which means I have much less of a sense of what to argue with. :-)

[lindenfoxcub.livejournal.com]

Hi new to your f'list, but loved Kingspeaker, on BCS.

I haven't expanded all the threads, but I don't think anyone has mention Michael Ende's "The Neverending Story" which, I think is the only portal story I've really liked apart from Narnia. But I think that's because there was purpose beyond wish fulfillment for bringing the MC to Fantasia, and also beyond saving fantasia. When he goes, he's already saved it; he's there to develop himself as a person.

I didn't like The Fionavar Tapestry, BTW, since so many people have lauded it already. I read it wondering why the portal element was there at all, seeing in it something that I had got over doing early on in my writing development. (This aside from the stylistic quirks that annoyed me.)

But that's where I see the difference between good and bad portal stories; the transportation to another world needs to be intrinsic to the story. The Fionavar tapestry could have been written without the portal element; the Neverending Story couldn't. I don't think the Narnia ones could either, since the first one had such a dependency on the fact that there were no humans in narnia, and the last one expands to the infinite Narnias beyond the door.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Glad you liked "Kingspeaker"!

I'd forgotten to think of The Neverending Story in this category, but you're right. And you make an interesting point about the purpose in it.

[kendokamel.livejournal.com]

Not that anyone will get to this comment, now that there are over 90 of them above me - but I read this YA series when I was a YA, that focused around this computer-whiz girl who somehow (through the magic of programming and a Nintendo Duck-Hunt gun) manages to turn her computer (and its green monochrome monitor) into a time machine that could send her (or her friends) back in time for two days, and only be gone from the present for two minutes.

They visited the Antebellum American South, Woodstock (and to give you an idea of how dated the books were, one of the main characters' friends was born AT Woodstock, so if those books were floating around the YA shelves today, the kids would be trying to figure out how a 40-year-old was in high school), 1930s Hollywood, and other Exciting Places in Time.

They did things that actually changed history (but only in GOOD and minor ways, of COURSE), and I never really thought about the implications until my wee little geekitude had matured into a more sophisticated one.

Overall, though, the series was everything a good YA girl series ought to be - smart, fun, adventurous, and depicting female characters who could be described by the same adjectives.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Actually, people have been coming back and poking at this thread a surprising amount. So you never know.

I wonder what series that was?

[nojojojo.livejournal.com]

ARGH WAS GONNA WRITE AN ARTICLE ABOUT THIS FOR THE MAGIC DISTRICT HOW DID YOU READ MY MIND. -_- Oh, well. =)

Anyway, for a portal fantasy I liked -- Guy Gavriel Kay's Fionavar Tapestry, as others have pointed out. I needed a grown-up version of Narnia when I hit late adolescence, and that was it. Also, mooching from comics, I've become very fond of Bayou lately.

Along the same lines, for an absolutely abysmal portal fantasy -- though it's supposedly science fiction, I call it "fantasy" because it was a deeply creepy white male power fantasy -- Heinlein's FARNHAM'S FREEHOLD. ::hork::

Wasn't all that fond of The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, either -- didn't get past book 1.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

<lol> Write the article -- I want to read it!

Okay, now my brain wants to get an academic article out of this, nevermind that I'm not in academia anymore . . . because there might be an interesting contrast between male-protagonist portal stories and female-protagonist ones, and how issues of colonialism and privilege vary between them. (If indeed they do.)

[malsperanza.livejournal.com]

Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass.

The Princess and the Goblin, The Princess and Curdie.

Pan's Labyrinth.

Tons of fairy tales.

Patricia McKillip's Winter Rose & the sequel