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

[snickelish.livejournal.com]

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).

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

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?)

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

It's funny that I can't remember a single portal fantasy that had only a female protagonist. Lots of them have only male protagonists, though. In the mid-80s there was Leo Frankowski's Crosstime Engineer series, which, again, didn't have much fantasy to it, aside from the initial time transport, and the notion that one might plausibly grow roses from seed. Another of my old favorites, Gordon Dickson's The Dragon and the George also has a male protagonist. I honestly can't remember the gender of the protagonist of Larry Niven's various time travel fantasies collected in The Flight of the Horse, but knowing Larry, I'd bet male.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

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.

[brigidsblest.livejournal.com]

Another portal fantasy series with a male protag from the 80s is Christopher Stasheff's 'Her Majesty's Wizard' series, and another still matching that criterion are the Spellsinger books by Alan Dean Foster.

I love portal fantasies, myself, and snap up ones I've overlooked whenever I find them. I think it rather sad that they aren't around much any more (although that sorrow may have its biased roots in the fact that the first serious, non-trunk novel I wrote was a portal fantasy).