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

[carbonel]

What didn't hold up well for you with the Norton? General craft stuff like plot, or something specific to the portal aspect?

Just the fact that it didn't have any depth. It was just the thing for a young reader, but the setting was a mishmash of Arthuriana and Faerie.

pameladean says that when she started writing the Secret Country books, her goal was to write something that would stand up to later rereading by an older reader. That's what was missing in the Norton book.

Oh, another book that I remember fondly is Charlotte Sometimes by Penelope Farmer, which involved time travel rather than fantasy as the portal device.

Actually, I have a whole bunch of time travel portal books, one of the most haunting of which is A Chance Child by Jill Paton Walsh. There it's the "other" character that's fallen out of his time into modern times rather than the other way around.

And there's The Time Tunnel by Caroline D. Emerson, which is another Scholastic book I was fond of and still have a copy of. In that one, a pair of children land in New Amsterdam, just before it's handed over to the British.

And there's a novel that I've been wracking my brains trying to remember. It went back and forth between now and the Edwardian period (IIRC), and the main character inhabited the body of a girl who was being taken over somehow by her evil brother. That one was brought back into print by (again, IIRC) Beth Meacham; I remember thanking her for it and her regretting that it was such a financial flop. There was also some confusion and disappointment for me with that author, because the governess in the book, who was an important subsidiary character, was named something like Grizel, and when I came across a book with a title close to Grizel's Story, I kept waiting for the stories to connect. But they never did, and I assume it was just a coincidence of name. I checked my shelves over, and can't remember the name of the book, and now it's bugging me.

Another one that doesn't work, IMO, is Will Shetterly's The Tangled Lands. That one is a sequel of sorts to his previous book Cats Have No Lord, but the fantasy land in CHNL is turned into a gaming/virtual reality world in TTL, to the detriment of both.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Time travel is portal-ish, true. Since you're automatically talking about crossing between settings that are very distinct from one another.