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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!
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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.
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Date: 2020-02-29 02:54 am (UTC)Thank you!
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.
Okay, cool. I tend to think of it as a hangover from C.S. Lewis that has no reason to be built into the genre except Narnia.
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.
(Yikes.) I grew up with literally dozens of titles by Norton in the house, because she was (a) one of my mother's favorite genre writers (b) prolific, so I may have read as many as a half-dozen books in the series—deep-time high fantasy with a substrate of post-apocalyptic weird SF in the pulp fashion of the '60's that is finally starting to become popular again—before I worked my way back to the first one, in which the protagonist is a WWII veteran whose black-market noir plot in post-war Berlin takes a hard right turn into Arthurian WTF when he's offered an escape by means of the Siege Perilous, which can transport a man into another world. Thence the Witch World, which most of the novels will just treat immersively in its own right, and every now and then someone will turn out to be aliens. The Witch World itself also contains portals, to parts of itself and to other worlds entirely, because they're just a thing in Norton cosmology. I didn't bat an eye when I got to Babylon 5 and the jump gates linking the galaxy that predate all known sentient races; someone built them, someone left them lying around, it happens all the time in Andre Norton.
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Date: 2020-02-29 03:24 am (UTC)Oh man, I love that trope. "Who built these?" "We don't know. Let's take a ride!"
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Date: 2020-02-29 04:09 am (UTC)I am a sucker for ancient lost technology even when it's not alien. (Roman concrete!)