(no subject)
Feb. 28th, 2020 02:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsFoz Meadows' An Accident of Stars truly does feel exactly like an eighties fantasy novel if the eighties in fantasy had been less straight and white, and if it had been around for me to read as a teenager I would have eaten it up with a spoon.
The book is a portal fantasy, in that two of the protagonists are Australian teen Saffron and the Earth-native world-walker Gwen she follows into fantasyland, although the portal stuff doesn't actually have much to do with the plot for most of the book except to provide the opportunity to explain stuff to Saffron and, by proxy, the reader. After an early-book dramatic injury, Saffron accepts with relative equanimity that she's stuck in fantasyland for a few months until a reasonable amount of healing time has passed, so the plot is free to focus on her new pals -- an orphan with magical powers and a mysterious background, and a bratty preteen queen fleeing her evil spouses -- as they deal with classic fantasy issues like The New King Is Bad Actually and Who Will Be Our Allies In The Rebellion, Is It The Mean Matriarchal Priestesses Up North Or What?
The book was a very slow start for me -- in part due to the large amount of infodumping, in part due to some editing issues with my copy that didn't properly separate some dialogue tags and POV breaks and made it difficult to always tell who was thinking or saying what -- but by midway through the fantasy plot had picked up momentum and I really enjoyed a number of the back half developments! But I sort of wish I hadn't gone in thinking 'ah, a portal fantasy!' because it doesn't really function in the ways that most interest me about portal fantasy -- which is to say, I'm interested in portal fantasy because I like culture clash and ironic juxtapositions and meta-narrative. I want to feel like the character who's portaling from our world has a life and background in their own world that means something to them, that informs the way they interact with the fantasy, and that impacts the things that happen there.
In An Accident of Stars, it's important to the narrative that Saffron is Not From Here, but I don't really know anything about her background specifically other than that she has parents and a sister and she goes to high school and she's a Kinsey 4ish. She's a window on the world as much as she is a character -- and that's definitely a common mode for portal fantasy, just not my favorite among them. On the other hand, it did get me thinking about the kind of portal fantasy tropes I do find really interesting, so here is a short list!
- portaler has no destiny but their mundane knowledge and experience comes in unexpectedly useful in fantasyland
- portaler does have a destiny, but their destiny is somehow complicated or subverted
- portaler is genre savvy and it's funny
- multiple people portal (siblings, school friends, school enemies, etc.) and their adventures change their relationships and dynamics
- portal world is weird and metafictional
What about you? Tell me of your favorite portal fantasy tropes!
The book is a portal fantasy, in that two of the protagonists are Australian teen Saffron and the Earth-native world-walker Gwen she follows into fantasyland, although the portal stuff doesn't actually have much to do with the plot for most of the book except to provide the opportunity to explain stuff to Saffron and, by proxy, the reader. After an early-book dramatic injury, Saffron accepts with relative equanimity that she's stuck in fantasyland for a few months until a reasonable amount of healing time has passed, so the plot is free to focus on her new pals -- an orphan with magical powers and a mysterious background, and a bratty preteen queen fleeing her evil spouses -- as they deal with classic fantasy issues like The New King Is Bad Actually and Who Will Be Our Allies In The Rebellion, Is It The Mean Matriarchal Priestesses Up North Or What?
The book was a very slow start for me -- in part due to the large amount of infodumping, in part due to some editing issues with my copy that didn't properly separate some dialogue tags and POV breaks and made it difficult to always tell who was thinking or saying what -- but by midway through the fantasy plot had picked up momentum and I really enjoyed a number of the back half developments! But I sort of wish I hadn't gone in thinking 'ah, a portal fantasy!' because it doesn't really function in the ways that most interest me about portal fantasy -- which is to say, I'm interested in portal fantasy because I like culture clash and ironic juxtapositions and meta-narrative. I want to feel like the character who's portaling from our world has a life and background in their own world that means something to them, that informs the way they interact with the fantasy, and that impacts the things that happen there.
In An Accident of Stars, it's important to the narrative that Saffron is Not From Here, but I don't really know anything about her background specifically other than that she has parents and a sister and she goes to high school and she's a Kinsey 4ish. She's a window on the world as much as she is a character -- and that's definitely a common mode for portal fantasy, just not my favorite among them. On the other hand, it did get me thinking about the kind of portal fantasy tropes I do find really interesting, so here is a short list!
- portaler has no destiny but their mundane knowledge and experience comes in unexpectedly useful in fantasyland
- portaler does have a destiny, but their destiny is somehow complicated or subverted
- portaler is genre savvy and it's funny
- multiple people portal (siblings, school friends, school enemies, etc.) and their adventures change their relationships and dynamics
- portal world is weird and metafictional
What about you? Tell me of your favorite portal fantasy tropes!
no subject
Date: 2020-02-28 09:30 pm (UTC)I don't think I read that much portal fantasy, but I wrote one, so I must have opinions. (They seem to be: why wouldn't people in the other world find it just as weird to have people from our world popping into it? Or find our world weird? I thought it was original at the time, but I suspect it now of being merely the fault of Diana Wynne Jones.) Agreed that the specifics of the traveler should matter, and that I like stories where more than one person can do it; I also like if there is some received knowledge of how the other world works, but it's out of date or fictionalized or incomplete. I may be actively uninterested in destinies unless something really deconstructive is done with them.
[edit] Among the many factors that make Andre Norton's Witch World series formally weird as hell is the fact that technically it starts as portal science fiction, even though the rest of the series is primarily immersive high fantasy. I thought that was normal as a young reader and I still think it should be.
no subject
Date: 2020-02-29 02:25 am (UTC)I would have said I was actively uninterested in destinies except that I love Twelve Kingdoms and its exploration of "unfortunately, you have got to be king of this magical land now" so much that it in fact brought me all the way round to actively interested in destinies, but only when done correctly.
I have only vague memories of the Witch World series but I'm very sure I must have read at least one of them as a child; I know I read a lot of Norton but the only thing I can remember now is, unfortunately, her collaboration with Mercedes Lackey.
(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2020-02-28 09:51 pm (UTC)I really hate the "you're too old for portal fantasyland now, off to mundane adulthood you go," trope, especially if it includes the even worse memory-wipe trope. The second volume of the Magicians had an interesting twist on that, tho. I don't much like portal fantasies where people on Earth think the adventurer is crazy or lying, unless it gets resolved very quickly.
-- I forgot another one I liked: where the traveler is genre-savvy, but also doesn't know what's going on because of the passage of time or expectations or amnesia or whatever, and has to bluff. Nine Princes in Amber is such a good example of that, especially in Zelazny's own very dry reading. And it's kind of very inside baseball, but I LOVE portal fantasies that happen because of books -- people falling into books, books literally opening up new worlds, fantasy books becoming real, and so on. Before Steven Millhauser got famous I cherished this weird little book he wrote, From the Realm of Morpheus, that was just intoxicated about books. Portal libraries! Portal bookstores! (And of course, books themselves are portals....)
I think it's more rare to have portal people visit our world and find it weird -- I love that bit in Howl's Moving Castle where they're bewildered by cars and jeans and jackets.
no subject
Date: 2020-02-28 11:33 pm (UTC)There's a novel called Dragonlinks by Paul Collins, which is secondary world fantasy with a protagonist native to the world it's set in, but the existence of other worlds is part of the plot, and at one point there's a brief interlude where a wizard who's been grievously wounded in a fight casts a spell that's supposed to take him to the nearest healer capable of helping him, and because his injuries are beyond the medical knowledge of his own world the spell transports him to our world or one very like it, where he's rushed off to ER and spends weeks recuperating in a hospital bed. And this is all narrated from his viewpoint, so it's things like him arriving at night beside a freeway and thinking shit, that's a lot of dragons, it's a good thing somebody seems to have painted warding lines down the side of their migration path to stop them escaping and eating people...
no subject
Date: 2020-02-28 11:53 pm (UTC)I really loved that too!
... Although now I'm thinking of that one Barbara Hambly duology which is "dude from another world transported to our world" portal fantasy entirely from his POV and he shows up in the middle of a conflict he knows nothing about, tries to use magic to help what he assumes are the underdogs in the fight ... and slowly figures out (along with the reader) that he's working for the Nazis.
(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2020-02-29 02:30 am (UTC)One of the other reasons I like it when portal fantasy is about several people, rather than just one, is you get much less of the 'traveler is totally isolated in the real world now that they've had this experience' and much more of the 'these people share a bond now that they've had this experience,' which is much more my jam!
I ALSO love 'genre-savvy but it's the wrong genre or otherwise incorrect information in wacky ways.' I'm pretty sure I missed the sweet spot for the Amber books, but every so often I think about trying them anyway ...
I didn't know Millhauser wrote a portal fantasy! My dad gave me a couple of his books when I was a kid and I read them multiple times, but somehow I've never read any of his books except the two that he gave me.
THAT BIT IN HOWL'S MOVING CASTLE IS SO GOOD.
(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2020-02-28 10:21 pm (UTC)But I don't just want the characters to be a window onto the world; I need them to be characters. I feel like, in order for portal fantasy to really work for me, I need to be sold on the reality of at least one side of the portal, and preferably both. I suppose there is a self-inserty aspect to it, but I don't just want the characters to be cyphers exploring the world with no background or inner lives, any more than I want that in an outer space adventure story, and there's no fun to exploring a world that's just a painted backdrop. The characters need to grow and change and have relationships and backstory, and the world needs to be more than a Tough Guide to Fantasyland parody for the characters to comment ironically upon.
Basically portal fantasy for me is just one version of "tell me a story" - in this case, "show me a world". I want to go exploring. And it's best of all when the two worlds interact more than just at the beginning - when the magic spills back into the protagonist's mundane world, or their other friends/family come find them in the fantasy world, that kind of thing. In fiction where characters live a divided life (being undercover, for example, or having a magical secret they're trying to hide), what I like best is watching the two sides of their life bleed into each other.
I'm not into Chosen Ones as such, buuuuuut I also think this is one area where the consciously deconstructive takes on the genre play it up a lot more than the original, formative, non-deconstructive versions - kind of like how, if you only read Tolkien derivatives, you'd think Tolkien was all about "an elf, a dwarf, and a ranger meet in a bar and have a bunch of random encounters" and it's actually a lot more than that. Similarly, most portal fantasy that I can think of is not about the portaling character being Just That Special, but about someone who accidentally stumbles into the portal world and then has to learn to live up to their own potential there - it's not really that different from a story about someone crash-landing in the wilderness and having to find their way out, or being caught by a serial killer, or being the sole survivor of a zombie plague. And actually most portal fantasy that I've read, at least the vast majority of what I've enjoyed, isn't about ~finding your destiny~ unless it's consciously deconstructing the trope (and is it really a trope if it's rarely played straight?). It's about figuring out who you are, and what you're capable of, while exploring a strange land.
no subject
Date: 2020-02-28 11:59 pm (UTC)Oh, I like that! That's really nice.
(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2020-02-29 12:32 am (UTC)I love when the characters have knowledge from one world that's helpful in another, like in Barbara Hambly's Darwath trilogy where a grad student in medieval history is able to figure out a mystery using archival research and her knowledge of ecology.
One of my favorite portal fantasies doesn't have a portal at all - the characters communicate without ever passing through. It's Dorothy Heydt's The Interior Life, in which a housekeeper in fantasyland and a discontented 80s housewife advise each other on their love lives and how to make a house into a home.
(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2020-02-29 02:49 am (UTC)I also definitely like it best when the worlds spill over, and inform each other, and the connections between them end up mattering to more people than just the protagonist. I remember reading a Vivian Vande Velde book some years back about a kid who gets transported into a video game and has real-feeling adventures, and the kid went on this whole journey but because there was never any sense that the characters that this kid met were anything more than real-feeling video game avatars, nothing that happened really felt like it mattered in a way that was satisfying to me. (As compared with the recent Jumanji movies, where the world isn't any more real, but because there are multiple kids in there, the interactions between the kids has a long-term impact that makes it feel worth it.)
(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2020-02-29 03:43 am (UTC)And thank you for articulating that about Chosen One Portal Fantasy tropes, and the formative versions versus the consciously deconstructive takes; I hadn't put that together, just felt vaguely irritated by a lot of the deconstructions without being able to say exactly why, and this is a lot of it, I think. Well, that and wanting the sense of wonder and exploration and self-discovery.
no subject
Date: 2020-02-28 11:04 pm (UTC)This sounds like a fun book too!
no subject
Date: 2020-02-29 02:53 am (UTC)I'd VERY HAPPILY take recs for webnovels where pals transmigrate through different identities, if you've got any to fling. :D
(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2020-02-29 12:28 am (UTC)I must have this.
no subject
Date: 2020-02-29 02:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-02-29 02:23 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-02-29 03:03 am (UTC)(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2020-02-29 02:30 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-02-29 02:57 am (UTC)Andre Norton wrote several. [edit] The portal-linked series of worlds in the Chain of Creation of P.C. Hodgell's Kencyrath series does not, except for the no-longer-canonical short story "Child of Darkness," include Earth.
(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2020-02-29 03:42 am (UTC)- At what point does a time-travel story become essentially a portal fantasy?
- Do all stories involving fairylands, heavens/hells/underworlds, or realms of the gods that are expected to parallel or overlap reality count as portal fantasies?
- Do stories where readers enter the worlds of books count as portal fantasies? This is a trend that I think has become less common in recent decades but was once very much alive.
no subject
Date: 2020-03-04 04:01 am (UTC)- I think time-travel and portal fantasy are definitely very overlapping genres, but paradox potential and existing historical record add a very different element and feel to time travel stories, while characters in a portal fantasy are much freer to do whatever (although I bet people have written portal fantasies that turned out to be surprise time travel before)
- I also feel like heavens/hells/underworlds/fairy worlds/realms of the gods are different but I'm having a hard time putting my finger on exactly why I feel that ... maybe because the premise of those kinds of books is usually 'the beings who live there know ALL about our world and have been impacting it since the beginning' whereas in a classic portal fantasy everyone's kind of on an equal footing? the portaller doesn't know jack about the world they get to but, likewise, the people in that world don't know anything about ours
- conversely, I do think of 'readers enter the world of a book' as part of the portal fantasy package -- and I'd be really curious to read more about how that trope migrated and mutated over in cdrama and cnovel land where 'reader enters the world of a drama/webnovel/video game' is a really popular trope right now, even though it seems to have fallen out of favor in English-language stuff!
What do you think? I am happy to be argued with on any of this!
(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2020-02-29 03:57 am (UTC)You know the Darwath series? (Which, excellent portal fantasy right there, if on the adult and depressing side.) You know how it's got a punk-kid-turned-wizard and grad-student-turned-warrior in it, who came through to fantasyland from our world and gave us a trilogy's worth of POV on that fantasyland?
Well, back in high school, having never heard of the Darwath books, I stumbled randomly across Icefalcon's Quest, a sequel to the trilogy that I didn't realize was a sequel to anything. I read it the once, and don't remember most of it. I've been vaguely meaning to reread it for ages, and see how it holds up. But what I do remember with blazing clarity is the scene in which Icefalcon talks about a problem with Gil and Rudy, who have been offhandedly established as coming from another world, and Gil mentions something about how in their world they have these things called computers, but there's no way to get at them here. (I think it was computers.) And it hit me: she's not from some random other fantasy world, she's from our world. She's a minor side character, she's not a protagonist, we're not going to follow her home from here, she's not going to whip out a computer; she's here to stay, and this is Icefalcon's story, not hers. It's just a cool bit of backstory. My mind was blown.
(Obviously, this is not actually what the situation was; Gil got three whole books of co-starring in a portal fantasy. But at the time, I thought it was a standalone. I was deeply impressed with Barbara Hambly for it.)
I would love to see more stuff like this -- that bit in Howl's Moving Castle where we go to Wales is far and away my favorite part of it, too. But even in books that don't have that, one thing I love is when I feel like the fantasyland characters do have that kind of viewpoint, whether or not we get to see it from inside their heads. That an Earth character may or may not be the Chosen Destined Savior Of The Plot Etc -- I love plenty of books where they are -- but that to the people around them, they're a weird person from a weird culture with some useful skills, and maybe a friend, but not someone whose viewpoint is the default for everyone around them. That other people are the protagonists of their own stories set in their own worlds and culture and customs, even if their story isn't the book we're getting. (But it's fun when it is.)
no subject
Date: 2020-03-04 03:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-02-29 04:20 am (UTC)(See Jumanji for the comedic version, and the Ascendance of a Bookworm anime for the more serious one -- in the latter, the main character takes over the body of a little girl who is dying from internal magic that she doesn't have the resources to control, and a driving force of the plot is being able to find and access those resources to channel that magic safely.)
no subject
Date: 2020-03-04 03:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-02-29 06:57 pm (UTC)I think a lot of fantasy books sidestep the difficulties that migrants normally go through when moving to a new place, but there's so much richness to the experience of migration/diaspora that's left unexplored. Even if you handwave the language barrier for ease of communication, I feel like portal protagonists should still feel the challenge of learning the new cultural rules and either adapting to or resisting them. I've yet to read a portal fantasy where the protagonist felt the same dual pressure to assimilate/preserve their cultural identity that I have moving from Asia to the West and back.
The portal fantasy of my heart is a transmigration story where the modern people who go into the wuxia world are ABCs who don't understand all the metaphors and literary allusions people keep making.
no subject
Date: 2020-03-01 02:48 am (UTC)M. John Harrison's "The East" (1996) touches on that, admittedly from the perspective of someone in our world who begins to suspect that his refugee acquaintance comes from somewhere much farther off than the other side of the recently fallen Iron Curtain. I believe the other Autotelia stories function similarly, although I've only read a couple.
(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2020-03-01 12:04 am (UTC)The Night-Threads trilogy has three portalers--two adult sisters and the teenage son of one of them--whose collective relationship is my second favorite part of the series, following the "By our powers of rap and opera combined!" showdown scene and narrowly edging out both the fact that the local sorceress Outshown by The Outworld Prodigy is allowed to be resentful about that without either of them being demonized, and the way that every time it looks like sweet, gentle Robyn is going to be a damsel in distress she turns into a giant bird instead.
no subject
Date: 2020-03-01 11:30 pm (UTC)(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2020-03-01 02:34 pm (UTC)But the only one I can think of that I've read recently is A.M. Dellamonica's The Hidden Sea Tales trilogy, which is about a diver named Sophie who ends up in a portal world with magic and potentially her own past. I think she actually was getting her master's in marine biology or something, so she was definitely more interested in how magic worked and the natural world than a lot of the politics she kept getting dragged into. I don't actually remember much about it, but Amazon tells me I bought all three books so apparently I enjoyed them enough to read the whole thing!
no subject
Date: 2020-03-04 03:19 am (UTC)