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

[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 . . . .

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

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.

[dr_whom]

The interesting thing about Merchant Princes is that not only is it not a "wish-fulfillment" portal fantasy, but at least in its setup it's a pretty severe deconstruction of the bog-standard wish-fulfillment changeling/portal fantasy. Consider: it's about a young woman from our world who suddenly discovers that her real parents are powerful nobles from a medieval-type world with apparent magical abilities and she is betrothed to a prince; it doesn't get more standard changeling-fantasy than that. But then it turns out that a parallel world with medieval-level technology and society is a squalid hellhole where a noble family is basically an organized crime gang and her only value to them is her ability to create a political alliance by marrying who they want her to marry and producing heirs. So it's not so much avoiding the standard wish-fulfillment tropes but actively subverting them.

Then it all turns into economic SF.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

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.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

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.

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

Regarding Fforde's proximity to Fanfic - I think there's a spectrum there, rather than a hard line.

Absolutely. But it's fun to explode the heads of people who really want to believe fanfic bears no relationship to Real Fiction. :-)

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

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.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Gah.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

How was Shakespeare not writing fanfic of various old stories we've forgotten because he did it better?

Anything Arthurian is arguably fanfic. Also Chistopher Moore's _Lamb_. _Journey to the West_. Possibly the Aeneid.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

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.