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

Iain Banks, "The State of the Art". Clarke's _Imperial Earth_? Not sure, and that one was from human culture, though not Earth.

Very true. I'm now wracking my brain, trying to think of an example from the other visitor's perspective... I think the danger there would be the temptation to describe everyday things here in bizarre terms, just so the reader could say, "Oh, she's really talking about McDonalds!" and then be amused at the little foreigner who doesn't understand.

Er, which is not to say I'd worry about you doing this. But I've seen a fair number of short stories, mostly SF rather than fantasy, that take this approach (although sometimes the distance is time rather than space - a future culture looking back and being amused by the 20th century), and if there isn't something else going on, too, it's just tedious. I'd imagine it'd be a huge help if the author already has the visitor's home culture and world firmly developed, so that the character has a basis as rich and complex as ours to compare everything to.

I think portal books offer a world that demands engagement by the protoganist.

That's an interesting thought, and one I'll chew on more.

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.

Hmmm. On the one hand, I see your point; on the other hand, I'm not sure that has to be true.

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.

I hate, with burning comets of hatred, stories that reduce their fantasy component to insanity or mere symbolism.

Sorry to hear that -- all the more so because I'm fairly certain he makes a real effort to avoid doing just that.

I know he tries. He just has a tin ear for dialog, and it's particularly bad when it comes to distinguishing characters/regionalities/nationalities. I had offered to help, but made the mistake of starting off catching up on the series reading mss that were already copyedited and approved and no longer fixable. Open the first of these, and on the first page, in the first paragraph, in the very first ever-loving sentence he's got an American woman using nail varnish. I plowed on for a while, but the errors just kept piling up and I just didn't have the heart to go on, knowing that there was no way to fix them.

You would.

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. :-)

Twelve Kingdoms was mostly a one-way trip. Even after being given immortality and the offer of emperorship, Youko wanted to go back to her life in Japan. Then she got told the people would suffer without her, collateral damage meant the magical unicorn she was talking too would refuse to take her back, she'd have to order her own unicorn to inflict Mega Storm Damage on both worlds in sending her back, and she'd die in a year anyway if she wasn't a good king. So mostly one-way.

Can't go back or doesn't go back seems common enough in my list.

Okay, well, that's what I'm doing already, so I guess the only fix is more Butt in Chair time. I had to give up on an otherwise very useful online writing group because at the time, being bombarded with story cues that were interesting just meant I had an ever greater backlog of works in progress distracting me from finishing any given existing one. I need fewer hobbies.

Okay, I suppose that makes sense.

Have you ever talked to

kurayami_hime about the Williams? She and I had basically the same experience: liked the first book, okay with the second, by halfway through the third the only person I cared about anymore was Miriamele and the story wasn't talking about her, and then when it finally got back to her I discovered I didn't care about her anymore, either.

And then the ending seemed very lame.

To borrow a phrase -- Fascinating!

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.

Hadn't thought of it that way, but you're right. Pity I didn't care about the characters enough to keep on, but Stross demonstrated early that he didn't mind treating major characters as disposable without lasting emotional consequences. Boyfriend's dead then? Oh, well, that's sad, let's get on with reforming the economic system of World 3.

That . . . is a powerful argument for not going back.

Doesn't go back strikes me as reasonably common; can't go back, less so.

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. :-)

Me as well, and I rather hated The Raw Shark Texts after expecting to like it. I suppose he leaves it a bit ambiguous, but insanity was frankly the only justification I could come up with for the incoherant world-building, Mary-Sue female companion, and the book's quite literal plagiarizing of the final third of Jaws.

Oz leaps to mind.

I can think of more male protagonists now, but it really might be the Mary Sue fanfic thing that makes me default to female in my head.

But is that more commonly an SF thing? Science fiction has its culture-collision tropes, too, but I'm thinking specifically of fantasy.

LJ doesn't have spoiler tags, shiver. :) Need to control font color manually.

Hmmm. I'm not sure what Shakespeare did was really what I would call fanfic. After all, it was the plots he generally borrowed from earlier sources, rather than the full-blown characters and world. I can't remember how many times he recycled Pyramus and Thisbe.

For using extant characters borrowed to tell new stories, I think your better bet would be Comedia del Arte, and possibly Mystery Plays as well.

It can be a cute trope for humour, but yeah, it's hard to take it past the simple giggles and into something more substantial.

Gah.

. . . yeah, I'll stay away from that one.

Funny thing is, magical unicorns are spirit creatures tasked with finding the divinely appointed king, so can cross worlds without problems, and the one she's talking to has made regular trips back to Japan for the last 500 years. He thinks democracy would be better than their system.

Can't go back at all seems common in time travel. Yankee, Cross-Time Engineer (iffy, someone else had time travel), Lest Darkness Fall, Island in the Sea of Time, Pebble in the Sky (title? Asimov). Fantasy... yeah, it tends to be more difficult, or something quested for, than impossible/never.

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.

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Today's ponderable

Re: Portal science-fiction

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