swan_tower | Today's ponderable

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Today's ponderable

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?

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Yes! Those were actually the main ones I was thinking of, though I was blanking on the title. It's been years since I read them.

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.

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

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).

You will NOT plant a plotseed into my head. I'm already ignoring 6 stories right now -- I don't have TIME to ignore another!

That said, if you were doing the whole epic fantasy, yeah, I could see the two culture thing. Might be best, though, as a total immersion, no big history; just a lot of unfolding and assumption. Readers are very accepting if you really make the 'now' of the character very velcro-hooky (don't you LOVE my technical terminology?)

Bah! No! Stop thinking stories! (Pardon, must go have a talk with my muse in the back).

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.

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?)

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?

it's a hard one to get into. I never would have kept reading it if not for OotS's vague update schedule, which kept me visiting on a regular basis.

(Pardon, must go have a talk with my muse in the back).

Why is there a crowbar in your hand?

Readers are very accepting if you really make the 'now' of the character very velcro-hooky (don't you LOVE my technical terminology?)

I do, actually. <g>

That was kind of where I was, too, and ended up deciding I didn't care that much. (Though I still go back to look for new OotS.)

:D

I'm in the unenviable position currently of having too many WIP going, and absolutely no ability to make myself write on any of them. Stories churn in my head, but want nothing to do with paper at all. It's not even 'writer's block'. It's more like "writer's rather fold laundry than write".

Yeah, crowbar.

I have books and books of proper literary terms. I can't remember any of them when I'm talking story, so I have to make schtuff up.

Anti-Sue! OO I've not heard that. Tell me more!

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

I wasn't necessarily recommending the Merchant Princes books, so much as holding them up as an example of recent portal fantasies that seem to sell well. (Perhaps there's a resurgence on the way.) Myself, I've had to give up on the series because Charlie's persistence in putting UK idiom in the mouths of American characters just drives me batshit crazy. I can't NOT be bothered by it.

Regarding Fforde's proximity to Fanfic - I think there's a spectrum there, rather than a hard line. It's not as if there isn't a literary tradition of 'legit' fiction interacting with previous works. I'm actually quite fond of the Fletcher Pratt and L. Sprague de Camp collection, The Compleat Enchanter, in which our academic protagonists wind up in the worlds of, among others, Norse mythology, and Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, by the charming plot device of altering their foundational premises using symbolic logic. And a bit earlier, you get John Myers Myers Silverlock, whose hero winds up dumped in the 'Commonwealth of Letters' and ends up encountering Simply Everybody, from the Green Knight to the Mad Hatter. More recently you have Charlie Stross doing a story set in the world of Orwell's 1984, twenty years down the line, exploring the problems of competent computing for the millennium in a totalitarian state. Tell me that isn't fanfic. Or, for that matter, his stories set in a world where H.P. Lovecraft's various horrors are real and sometimes wander through to our world if not stopped by the bureaucratic derring-don't of The Laundry.

I'm not much into fanfic, myself, but I think there's a lot of legitimate writerly learning going on in that microcosm, and the line, if there is one, between fanfic and Legitimate Literature, may be blurry at best, and partly dependent on whose ox is being gored.

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.

Edited 2009-04-21 20:13 (UTC)

If you ever come up with a working solution to the too many stories in your head problem, I'd love to know about it...

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.

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.

Edited 2009-04-21 20:19 (UTC)

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.

But what about the rest of us who want to know the titles?!?!

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.

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.

Merchant Princes has a bit of that: women from a feudal America encountering the modern USA. And all the tech and wealth they get from us, since it's a two-way portal world. MP also handles languages naturally: the Clan has learned English, and Miriam has to learn other languages the hard way... though I think the third world speaks English, it being a parallel Earth.

Other points:
Time travel stories can be a form of portal story, e.g. Connecticut Yankee or Lest Darkness Fall. This may provide more male characters than the straight portal fantasies. Also something like Stasheff's Warlock books. Julian May's Pliocene Saga is a multi-character time travel portal story.

Japan has some number of portal stories: Twelve Kingdoms novel and anime (features: political not romantic, divine magic solves the language problem, limited two-way contact); Fushigi Yugi, Escaflowne, Mahou Shoujoutai (Magical Girl Squad Alice, brought over as Tweeny Witches *cries*). Female-centric, though in 12K Taiki is a male who's crossed and back, and the anime brings a male and female companion for Youko that she didn't have in the novel. Plus two very important other characters are males from Japan... though most of these are actually 12K natives who got blown to Japan as fetuses.

12K also deconstructs standard portal fantasy a bit: Youko has a rough time of it; Suzu is an actual Japanese girl who has an even rougher time of it (not being a ruler, she doesn't get the magical language facility); the anime companions include a girl who takes the whole fantasy portal scenario to heart... but *isn't* the chosen one.

Other portals: Rick Cook's Wizardry Compiled books (male), and yeah, vaguely remembered books where people got sucked into a D&D world, with dice rolling across the sky and real hexes. Oh, and the D&D cartoon.

Edited 2009-04-21 20:32 (UTC)

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

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