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

[jsbangs.wordpress.com (from livejournal.com)]

Someone upthread mentioned Twelve Kingdoms, which was the first one I was going to recommend. I only know it through the anime, though--has the original novel been translated into English?

But you asked for terrible examples, and I'm wracking my brain trying to think of the name of that Christian portal fantasy I read in gradeschool. I'll get back to you.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

Several of the novels and stories have been translated by fans; 3 of the novels have been officially translated by Tokyopop. I think one fan (Eugune Woodbury) is a better translator, but I bought the books to support the author.
http://mindstalk.net/jk/
is my own fanpage, including links or mirrors of various translations.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Heh. I'm all about making people remember the bad stuff!

[juushika.livejournal.com]

Harry Potter's all but a portal fantasy, imho, given the way the wizarding world gets divided off. as you wrote somewhere up there. And I concur. A lot of the examples which want to spring to mind are everything-but portal fantasies. Harry Potter, where the magic world is completely unknown and separate, nevermind that it's technically part of our own. Neverwhere (although Gaiman has some actual portal fantasies, like Stardust and Coraline), where the magic world is just out of sight but again part of our own. Urban fantasy I think makes these sort of not-portal fantasies all the more common—in fact, they may be what's replacing that minigenre in large part. I have mixed opinions on all of them, but my view largely boils down to: They're good if the fantasy world is sufficiently separate and realistically hard to believe in. If a character finds Magic Wonder Land in their back garden and doesn't blink, I can't believe in either the character or the magic. When they find Magic Wonder Land and it's intelligently created and reasonably explained (as to why they hadn't found it before), I may well go on to love the book.

There are also portal from another world fantasies—not where someone comes to ours, but when they escape their fantasy world for another fantasy world. His Dark Materials comes to mind there. What makes those books a success is that each of the worlds within worlds feel real. A portal fantasy from our world makes the initial setting pretty easy to characterize, but when they start in a fantasy world there's an automatic extra area of worldbuilding which needs work.

In all cases and varieties of portal fantasies, including the old school our world --> magical world version, what makes it work for me:

Realistic world building, including: The fantasy world(s) should have good and bad points. If they're happy wonder worlds, they're pure escapism; if they're excessively dark undergrounds, they're cheap thrills. They need to be as real and varied as any non-fantasy world, while still preserving enough wonder, in whatever form, to make the reader want to visit.

Speaking of which, wish-fulfillment isn't bad. Mary Sues are bad, sure, but a portal fantasy should open a whole new world in the magic-carpet-riding-and-singing sense: it should have its own sort of beauty and wonder, it should inspire dreams.

Realistic disbelief and difficulties when encountering the other world. If the character accepts it too easily, they feel fake. If they fit in too easily, the world feels fake. If the transition isn't difficult, there should be a reasonable explanation as to why.

Examples of strict portal fantasies which I would consider remarkably successful include: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Through the Looking-Glass, Palimpsest, The Hounds of the Morrigan (okay, not quite so strict), Pan's Labyrinth, Coraline, Narnia.

[juushika.livejournal.com]

Oh! I forgot to add 10th Kindgom to the list of successes.

Most of the failures for me have been less strictly portal fantasy and more portal-ish treading towards urban fantasy. I think with a lot of portal fantasies it's possible to see fail coming pretty early—because, ideally, the portal is discovered early, and the hokiness/excessive ease/Mary Sues are visible from the beginning. (And then I stop reading and push them from my memory, so it's hard to list.)

[mmegaera.livejournal.com]

There are way too many comments for me to read through right now, alas, but has anyone mentioned an old kids' book called Shadow Castle by Marian Cockrell? I had good enough memories of it that I searched it out again a few years ago, and it's still as good as I remember.

and for something completely different

[strangerian.livejournal.com]

The story "Mom and Dad on the Home Front" (in an anthology titled New Magics) takes another end of the stick in showing parents whose grade-school children are disappearing at night, coming back with strange mementos, and then they find a magic wand... It's a nice take on the theme, and maybe gives some insight as to why world-travellers are often loners or orphans in the first place, or at least traditionally return to the very minute they left. It's by Sherwood Smith, which I hadn't recalled until I checked the book just now. Very much of the deftly realistic view of this world, while epic magic hovers in the sidelines.

[cofax7]

I have to go to bed before reading all the comments, but I wanted to drop a rec for Joyce Ballou Gregorian's stuff, that very odd trilogy, which was a rather unstandard portal fantasy. OOP now, I believe, more's the pity.

Second the rec for the Martha Wells' Ile-Rien novels: very fun, complicated politics, and not really very wish-fulfillmenty at all. (Although we do get a bit of a romance.)

One could argue that Charlie Jade (the South African tv show) is a portal fantasy, although I guess it's technically portal SF.

[amysun.livejournal.com]

Wow, so many comments. Has anyone said Coraline yet? If they haven't, consider it said. If they have, then yes, I agree. :)

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Yes, Coraline is in there somewhere.

God only knows where . . . .

[doriscrockford2.livejournal.com]

These may not be quite as popular in fiction at the moment, but if you change the fantastical word "portal" to the more scientific "wormhole", the successful tv shows "Lost" and "Fringe" seem to be exploring that.

I completely agree with the "His Dark Materials" mention above. That would be my favourite example of the portal genre. I can't think of any that haven't already been mentioned for my best/worst; my thing as a kid was time-travel stories, which aren't too far off, I suppose. The fish out of water aspect was certainly one of the appealing factors, and also the ability to learn about another society "first-hand" as it were: the protagonist and I were both experiencing the world for the first time.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

Farscape!
Also Futurama, on the time travel side.

Howl's Moving Castle is a bit odd: not primarily a portal fantasy, but Howl's from Earth, and Sophie gets to visit modern Wales a bit, so we get our world from her perspective.

[unforth.livejournal.com]

Don't have time to fully engage this cause I've read a lot of portal fantasy (Narnia, Xanth has elements of it, various humor/fantasy by folks like Margaret Ball, Thomas Covenant of course, etc.) but I want to mention that this is an entire manga genre, too, and I've read some of those. I'd say the BEST example (not that that's what you're aiming for) is "From Far Away," but "Red River" is excellent too. The worse? Probably Stephan Donaldson. Oh, Thomas Covenant, why?

[celestinenox]

The Catswold Portal. Can't remember the name of the author off the top of my head.

It was a little confusing, actually, as the main character was born in the other world, apparently lived as a child in our world for a few years before being discovered and moved back to the other world to then live as the daughter/apprentice to a wise woman. Of course, this is my straight-forward assessment of all that having read it a couple of times. It's not nearly so clear on the reading of the book.

Main character is also a cat shapeshifter. Oh, and the real queen of her cat-shifter people.

Wish fulfillment? Yeeeaaaah. I'd have to say so. It's well-written, if confusing at points, and entertaining, but obviously not a spectacular book plot-wise.

[tapinger.livejournal.com]

I thought of a couple almost examples while reading this, and one real one that I just read.

The real example I just finished (really, 10 minutes ago) is LightLand, by H. L. McCutchen. The cover and the SignificantWords are ... uninspiring ... but I actually ended up liking it, even if it's mostly fluff: Lottie Cook finds her way to a land made of memories through a cherry box given to her by her father.

One of the "almosts" is Sean Russell's The River Into Darkness, where Earth is strongly implied to be a parallel world. I found the ending depressing but portals play a fairly significant role in the story: it appears wizards came through the portals originally, and it's likely that all but the one remaining returned to Earth (or other worlds) through them by the time the story begins. There's also a blatant reference to Hiroshima. Although the wizards have a better grasp of science than the world at large, there are definite magical elements.

The other "almost" is Timothy Zahn's The Green and the Gray. The aliens (plant parasites and troll-like creatures) escaped from their own world to Earth, and have apparently been hiding among humans for a while. Not a great book in my opinion, but there is a twist.

Two others that I read a while back are the Archives of Anthropos by John White (a much more obviously Christian version of Narnia) and the Spectrum Chronicles by Thomas Locke, mostly light sci fi (but the mechanism for traveling to the other universe is never explained, and I would call that part of it fantasy).

[tapinger.livejournal.com]

Here's a few more, just for fun.

Catherine Fisher's Incarceron: The twist here is that the other world was created as a giant prison. (Note that my sci fi sensibilities were offended by the mechanics until I accepted that this book is really fantasy with a sugar coating of sci fi.) Also, the story follows characters on both sides, but no one really crosses over until near the end.

Jame Stoddard's The High House. Earth is barely touched in this one (it really only plays a role near the beginning) but the High House does connect it and other fantastic lands.

Between Two Worlds (http://www.between-two-worlds.net/). Fairly straightforward portal story, although the other world is mostly uninhabited and the wish fulfillment, if there is any, doesn't really go their way. Also one of the few webcomics that I've actually seen finish rather than merely stop.