The Twelve Treasures books are some of the most memorable fantasy I've read, mainly for the vivid language and characters. Large parts of the story take place on each side of the portal, with the respective fish-out-of-water qualities going both ways. This seems unusual to me for the genre (though I may not have read enough samples to judge). The Elfland is a lot more "warts and all" than most examples, and the familiar and fantastic bump up against each other a lot, which gives the storyline a lot of energy.
Edgehill's done a more conventional portal story in The Warslayer, which reads like a Xena adventure gone portal, and deflects the Mary Sue concept onto an action-genre actress catapulted into a Real Thing version of swords'n'sorcery. The same device works in some fanfic I've seen, where the here-and-now character visiting a real space opera/historic setting/etc, is an actor (or fervent fan) accustomed to seeing the nuts-and-bolts of a stage set instead of spaceship/castle/alien planet for real.
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yati
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Date: 2009-04-22 03:58 am (UTC)Edgehill's done a more conventional portal story in The Warslayer, which reads like a Xena adventure gone portal, and deflects the Mary Sue concept onto an action-genre actress catapulted into a Real Thing version of swords'n'sorcery. The same device works in some fanfic I've seen, where the here-and-now character visiting a real space opera/historic setting/etc, is an actor (or fervent fan) accustomed to seeing the nuts-and-bolts of a stage set instead of spaceship/castle/alien planet for real.