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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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]

Yeah, I've got one that's been in the back of my head for a dog's age, that (at least in part) always intended to be a deconstruction. But it needs to be done right, if I'm ever going to do it.

Problem is, I try to dodge the bad ones, too, and I feel like I need a broader sense of how this trope works before I'll know how I want to play with it. I mean, other than going through into another world, what is the general pattern of those stories? I can't break it until I know that.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I call that a Death Of The Magic ending, and I hate them so much. I read The Whim of the Dragon between the cracks in my fingers because I had already met and liked pameladean when I could finally buy a copy, and I was so afraid she would do that to me, and it would actually be a person doing it to me instead of an abstract authorial construct. And then she stuck the landing, go Pamela.

[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.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I think in the bad ones there's the universe-version of the Great White Hope problem, which we see in Narnia a bit: that very often there is something special about people from another world (often children from another world) that they have to fix what is wrong with the world they've stumbled into.

[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.

[dsgood.livejournal.com]

By the time you finished writing it, the market might have changed.

A couple of decades ago, Lawrence Block felt he had to explain to readers of his column on writing what tie-ins and novelizations had been -- there was no longer any market for them. They've definitely come back.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Oh, Joel Rosenberg did a series of them that fit the RPG reference below. Guardians of the Flame, I think is the series name.

[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]

Which makes me think of the Thomas Covenant books. (And not in a good way. Though I'm not sure I've ever thought of them in a good way, come to think on't.)

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

This isn't something I'm intending to do right now, in part because of the reason you name. But the idea has always been sitting on about the fifth burner or so, and today I felt like poking at it.

[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.

[j-cheney.livejournal.com]

I e-mailed my reccomendation ;o)

[dsgood.livejournal.com]

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

[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.)

[janni.livejournal.com]

Yeah, all trends come around ... which also makes me think I must not feel passionate about the project to just write it anyway, which is reason enough to hold off, as well.

Could change one day, of course ...

[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]

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 . . . .