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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: 2020-02-28 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.
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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.
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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.
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Date: 2020-02-28 11:04 pm (UTC)This sounds like a fun book too!
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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...
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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.
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Date: 2020-02-28 11:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-02-28 11:59 pm (UTC)Oh, I like that! That's really nice.
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Date: 2020-02-29 12:28 am (UTC)I must have this.
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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.
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Date: 2020-02-29 02:23 am (UTC)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.
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Date: 2020-02-29 02:30 am (UTC)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.
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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.)
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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
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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 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.
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Date: 2020-02-29 02:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-02-29 02:59 am (UTC)It's the best.
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Date: 2020-02-29 03:01 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-02-29 03:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-02-29 03:15 am (UTC)Also, this is not a recommendation, but Piers Anthony wrote a series in which the protagonist, a serf on an Oppressive Science Fiction Space World, learns that he can portal over into a Magical Fantasy World. All I remember about this series is it involved robots and unicorns and lower-class citizens on the Oppressive Space World were not allowed to wear clothes, as a result of which the protagonist considered clothes very kinky and seductive.
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Date: 2020-02-29 03:15 am (UTC)SO MUCH. I don't think I know anyone who likes it! (It's like the more modern version of "And then she woke up." No!)
I'm pretty sure I missed the sweet spot for the Amber books, but every so often I think about trying them anyway ...
I read and reread them as an adolescent, but I don't think they really hold up that well in some ways. (The sexism REALLY bothers present-day Moi.) I do love Corwin's modern slang and cultural references and how he keeps using them to annoy or unbalance people. I think those books actually fall down some on worldbuilding -- I wanted to know more about Amber, and how the various worlds influenced each other, and way less about the struggle over which male relative was going to be King, Next. But a lot of the first five books are fun. (I found the next five books unreadable, sigh.)
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.
He did! It's his very first or second book I think, it's not even in some bibliographies. It hasn't been released for Kindle, either. Morpheus is a total OTT Romantic poetry-spouting tour guide, it's hilarious.
THAT BIT IN HOWL'S MOVING CASTLE IS SO GOOD.
I remember when I first read it ACTUALLY being confused at how Sophie was seeing her clothes, and then realizing, "Oh those are JEANS." Such moments are precious.
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Date: 2020-02-29 03:17 am (UTC)That is TOTALLY the arc of the characters in The Beginning Place, especially the girl (who's wonderfully prickly).